AWS announces Local Zone in Hanoi, Grok 4.3 in Bedrock, and multiple AI and cloud service updates

AWS announced the launch of a new Local Zone in Hanoi, Vietnam, designed to meet data residency requirements by enabling customers to store and back up data locally. The Hanoi Local Zone supports Amazon S3 and Amazon EBS Local Snapshots, and can be enabled via the AWS Global View or ModifyAvailabilityZoneGroup API.

The company also added Grok 4.3 from xAI to Amazon Bedrock, providing customers with a new model option for generative AI applications. Grok 4.3 runs on a new inference engine in Bedrock optimized for price performance, with support for tool calling, structured output, and response streaming.

AWS introduced multiple price reductions to lower costs for customers. Amazon S3 Vectors now offers up to 80% lower query charges for large vector indexes, reducing expenses for similarity search workloads in AI, RAG, and semantic search. Amazon GameLift Servers provides free network bandwidth for all instance types from generation 6 and later, with no additional charge for inbound or outbound traffic. AWS Marketplace also reduced listing fees for professional services from 2.5% to 0.5%.

New agentic AI tools were unveiled, including AWS Continuum, an AI-native security service that proactively identifies and remediates code vulnerabilities across the lifecycle. AWS Security Agent, now part of AWS Continuum, adds features such as threat modeling, pull request code scanning with remediation, and IDE integrations via Kiro power, Claude Code plugin, and MCP.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore, now generally available, provides a framework for deploying agents to production in minutes. It includes a GA harness for infrastructure and orchestration, Web Search, Managed Knowledge Base, policy integrations with Guardrails, and the new AWS Context service for mapping organizational data relationships.

Additional updates include the introduction of AWS Blocks, an open-source TypeScript framework for building applications locally before deploying to AWS services without code changes. Strands Agents, an open-source toolkit for building production agents, now supports better context management, isolated execution environments, and chaos testing capabilities.

AWS also announced Amazon ECS faster service auto scaling, which reduces time to trigger scale-out by 76% and total time to scale and provision new tasks by 72% in benchmarking tests. Amazon EC2 G7 instances now feature NVIDIA RTX PRO 4500 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs, delivering up to 4.6x AI inference performance and 2.1x graphics performance compared to G6 instances.

AWS Marketplace Storefront reached general availability, allowing partners to create branded catalogs of solutions for easier customer discovery and purchasing.