Pinterest Invests US$4bn in AWS for AI Search Expansion

Pinterest, the visual inspiration search engine, has expanded its collaboration with AWS as its preferred cloud services provider.

The partnership includes a US$4bn commitment for cloud services through to 2031.

The agreement is the largest infrastructure commitment in Pinterest’s history and is expected to accelerate the company’s AI roadmap, provide a more responsive search and shopping experience, and further modernise its infrastructure. 

“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.”  

Powering gen AI with AWS infrastructure

Pinterest has worked with AWS since 2010 to improve the reliability, efficiency and performance of its core services. 

Pinterest uses AI to make visual discovery and personalisation simple and effective. 

Driven by its Taste Graph, Pinterest takes users from broad inspiration to highly personalised, actionable ideas. 

The platform has quickly upgraded its technology from older systems with Gen AI, continually improving its own visual AI and adopting the best open-source models. 

The latest innovation is the Pinterest Assistant, which turns visual search into a simple, multi-step conversation, thanks to powerful, scalable open-source vision-language models.

“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. 

“This commitment provides Pinterest the AI infrastructure to move faster and deliver new experiences to users sooner.”

Pinterest’s next steps

Pinterest plans to diversify its use of accelerated compute to support its growing AI needs. This includes using AWS Trainium to host and run large language models and vision-language models for personalised visual search and AI-assisted discovery. 

AWS Graviton already powers “roughly a third” of Pinterest’s compute, according to the firm. Pinterest will expand this to support discover for more than 600 million people every month. 

“Over the last 16 years, I’ve watched Pinterest evolve from a visual pinboard into an AI-powered discovery platform serving more than 600 million users around the world,” writes  Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, on LinkedIn. 

“Most recently, that includes Pinterest Assistant, which helps people explore ideas through natural conversation.

“I've always appreciated how focused Bill Ready and this team are on improving the experience for their users, and it's exciting to see that innovation continue to accelerate.

“Supporting that kind of evolution requires flexibility. Graviton already powers a third of Pinterest’s infrastructure, and they’re now adding Trainium to accelerate the AI models behind personalized search and discovery.”