Pinterest Announces US$4bn AI Partnership with AWS

Pinterest has confirmed an expanded partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that includes a US$4bn commitment for cloud services extending through to 2031. The visual discovery platform says the infrastructure agreement represents the largest such commitment in its history.

The deal could support the company's AI development plans and modernise its technical infrastructure. Pinterest operates a platform used by more than 600 million people each month.

Cloud investment supports growth plans

Pinterest has maintained a relationship with AWS since 2010 to support its core services. The expanded agreement provides compute resources and infrastructure that the company will use to develop its AI capabilities.

According to Pinterest, the arrangement offers compute flexibility and hardware options to support visual discovery features. The platform uses AI to deliver personalised content recommendations to its user base.

The company's technology relies on what it calls the Taste Graph, which processes user preferences to deliver content suggestions. The Pinterest Assistant feature allows users to conduct visual searches through conversational interactions using vision language models.

Technology partnership spans 16 years

"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," says Matt Madrigal, CTO at Pinterest.

"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."

Matt Madrigal joined Pinterest as CTO to lead the technical infrastructure and product development initiatives. The partnership with AWS provides the computational resources to support both consumer-facing features and advertising performance tools.

Infrastructure expansion targets scale

"Pinterest is building some of the most advanced visual AI systems on AWS, powering discovery for more than 600 million users," says Dave Brown, SVP of Compute & ML Services at AWS.

"As one of our longest-standing customers, we know what it takes to support that scale securely and efficiently. AWS compute and purpose-built silicon like Trainium and Graviton give Pinterest the price-performance to train and run AI models at massive scale across both training and inference."

According to Pinterest, AWS Graviton currently powers roughly a third of the company's compute infrastructure. The company plans to expand this deployment and use AWS Trainium to host large language models and vision language models for search and discovery features.

The infrastructure could support personalised visual search capabilities and AI-assisted discovery tools. These features connect users with content based on their interests and search behaviour whilst supporting Pinterest's advertising business model through improved ad targeting and relevance.