Pinterest signs $4bn cloud services deal with AWS

Pinterest has entered into a cloud services agreement with Amazon Web Services (AWS), valued at $4bn and extending through to 2031.

The deal represents the largest infrastructure commitment in Pinterest’s history and is designed to underpin the company’s next phase of development in AI and platform modernisation.

The visual search and discovery platform, which reports serving over 600 million users each month, relies on AWS as its preferred cloud services provider.

The latest agreement builds on a partnership that dates back to 2010, during which time Pinterest and AWS cooperated on optimising large-scale data lake environments.

AWS compute and machine learning (ML) services senior vice president Dave Brown said: “Pinterest is building some of the most advanced visual AI systems on AWS, powering discovery for more than 600 million users. As one of our longest-standing customers, we know what it takes to support that scale securely and efficiently.”

Under the terms of the new deal, Pinterest intends to use AWS for a range of AI-related workloads, including model training, inference, and operational infrastructure.

The company is adopting AWS Trainium silicon to run both large language and vision-language models, supporting features such as personalised visual search and AI-assisted discovery.

Additionally, Pinterest will expand its use of AWS Graviton processors, which currently account for around one third of its computing workload, to broaden the systems supporting its users around the world.

The transition to AWS’s Kubernetes-based architecture will form a key part of Pinterest’s ongoing platform modernisation.

Migrating from traditional EC2-based environments to Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) is expected to deliver improvements in operational reliability, developer velocity, and overall infrastructure efficiency.

Pinterest chief technology officer Matt Madrigal said: “Pinterest is heavily investing in AI to make discovery more personal, visual, and actionable for the hundreds of millions of people who use our platform every month.

“This expanded commitment with AWS gives us the compute flexibility, hardware optionality, and infrastructure efficiency to accelerate our AI vision for the next generation of visual discovery on Pinterest.

“This strategic partnership will help accelerate AI innovation at Pinterest, improving both our consumer experience and advertiser performance by advancing our proprietary models and our use of open-source models.”

Recently, Pinterest introduced its latest platform features, including the Pinterest Assistant, an AI-powered discovery tool leveraging multi-turn conversational technology and open-source vision-language models. These updates are part of wider efforts to enhance user experience and the underlying AI infrastructure.

Last month, AWS announced the general availability of Claude Platform on its cloud service, making it the first provider to give customers direct access to Anthropic’s native Claude Platform environment through their existing AWS accounts.