AWS, Upstage deepen ties in AI drive across Asia-Pacific, US

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has reinforced its partnership with South Korean artificial intelligence startup Upstage, backing the company with a minority investment as they expand AI services across Asia-Pacific and the US.

Upstage said Tuesday it will designate AWS as its preferred cloud provider and use its infrastructure to train and deploy its Solar family of large language models (LLM).

The startup will tap AWS offerings, including SageMaker as well as its Trainium and Inferentia chips, to expand the lineup of its LLM models and document-intelligence tools.

The partnership includes joint go-to-market efforts to offer generative AI services for government, public-sector and regulated industries that require high security and compliance.

“Upstage and AWS have built a strong foundation through years of collaboration, and this agreement opens a new chapter to accelerate global AI innovation,” said Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon.

Abhijeet Muzumdar, Amazon’s vice president of corporate development, called Upstage a key AI innovator in Asia-Pacific and said AWS’s backing would help the startup scale its foundation models and enterprise AI products.

The financial terms of AWS' investment were not disclosed.

The AI startup, however, said on Wednesday that Amazon joined Upstage's Bridge B funding round as a new backer alongside AMD, helping raise a total of 62 billion won ($4.4 million).

Existing supporters, including KB Securities, Shinhan Venture Investment, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Primer Sazze Partners and Premier Partners, also invested. 

Founded in 2020, Upstage recently introduced Solar Pro 2, a 31-billion-parameter model designed for complex reasoning and agentic workflows in areas such as math, coding and legal analysis.

It also offers an enterprise-grade Document Intelligence tool on AWS Marketplace for extracting and structuring data from contracts, invoices and financial statements.

The latest partnership builds upon earlier collaboration. In April, AWS and Upstage launched the AI Initiative, a program offering free access to Upstage’s APIs and AWS training tools to accelerate adoption in educational and nonprofit institutions.

More than 200 organizations, including Seoul National University and KAIST, have joined the program.

(Updated to include new 8th and 9th paragraphs on Amazon’s participation in Upstage’s Bridge B funding round.)

Write to Sookyung Seo at skseo@hankyung.com