AWS Partners with Upstage in Strategic APAC AI Push

August 19, 2025

Details

  • Upstage, a South Korean AI startup, unveiled a strategic partnership with AWS on August 19, 2025, involving co-sales initiatives and Amazon's minority investment to expand generative AI access in the APAC region and the United States.
  • AWS will serve as Upstage’s preferred cloud provider for future development and deployment of its foundation models, utilizing Amazon SageMaker, AWS Trainium, and Inferentia chips to drive the Solar language model suite.
  • The collaboration emphasizes delivering AI solutions tailored for government agencies, public sector organizations, and industries demanding high levels of security and compliance.
  • This partnership follows an earlier 2025 initiative that gave over 200 educational institutions—including Seoul National University and KAIST—free access to Solar models, along with previous integrations of Upstage’s models into AWS Marketplace and Amazon Bedrock.
  • The alliance highlights Upstage's Solar family, including the new Solar Pro 2 model with 31 billion parameters and dual Chat and Reasoning modes, as well as Document Intelligence tools for enterprise document processing.

Impact

This alliance underlines AWS’s approach to building local AI strength in the APAC region, differentiating itself from the more global expansion tactics of OpenAI and Google. Upstage’s focus on public sector AI could position it as a leader in government adoption across Asia, while integration with AWS’s infrastructure aims to speed enterprise uptake of language models tailored for Korean and Asian markets.

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