Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon.com, announced today that Leonardo.AI, an Australian generative artificial intelligence (AI) content production platform, is generating 4.5 million new images daily on the world’s most comprehensive and widely used cloud. Since its launch in December 2022, Leonardo.AI users have trained over 400,000 custom conceptual AI models and produced more than 700 million images. This revolutionary platform is transforming content creation worldwide, enabling users to swiftly generate concepts and realistic images suitable for various fields such as gaming, media, entertainment, marketing, environments, and portraits. Leonardo.AI boasts one of the largest conceptual AI communities globally, with over 1.8 million subscribers, making it the fourth most-watched Discord network.
Due to a sudden surge in customers that its previous cloud provider could not accommodate, Leonardo.AI selected AWS as its cloud service provider. The company aims to maintain outstanding performance and user experience while managing its rapid growth. To address this challenge, AI swiftly migrated its workloads to AWS within two weeks, leveraging the resilience, security, and flexibility of AWS’s global infrastructure to effectively handle the escalating consumer demand. By harnessing AWS’s top-notch network, users of Leonardo.AI are accelerating content creation from months to mere minutes, unlocking creativity on a vast scale.
In a bid to propel Leonardo.AI’s global expansion efforts, the company is leveraging Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Inf2 instances for cost-effective and high-performance generative AI inference, including running large language models (LLMs). These instances are powered by AWS Inferentia2, the second-generation AWS Inferentia accelerator, resulting in a 60% reduction in inferencing costs and up to a 35% boost in language model inference speeds for the startup.
With AWS’s technical guidance, business support, and mentorship, Leonardo.AI is shaping the rapidly evolving field of relational AI. Scaling AWS workloads to meet surging customer demands is crucial for rapid expansion. In under a month, customers have generated a remarkable 700 million images on the platform. Peter Runham, co-founder and CTO of Leonardo.AI, highlighted that viewing each image for just a minute would take over 19 years of continuous viewing. Additionally, the collaboration with AWS’s cutting-edge AI partners has been pivotal for Leonardo.AI’s growth, with plans to explore how Amazon Bedrock can further enhance creative possibilities for customers.
In May, Leonardo.AI was selected as the first Asia-Pacific company to participate in the global AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, offering promising startups up to US$300,000 in AI and machine learning (ML) coaching, networking opportunities, and technical support from AWS product teams. Since completing the program, AWS has played a vital role in the firm’s rapid and global expansion. AWS’s management of facilities, secure graphics card unit provisioning, and technical backing have been instrumental in Leonardo.AI’s journey. The AI team is dedicated to enhancing its capabilities and expanding its customer base further.
Bratin Saha, AWS’s Vice President of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, expressed excitement about Australia’s burgeoning engineering talent and the collaboration with Leonardo.AI. Leveraging Amazon Rock, Leonardo.AI is poised to push the boundaries of fundamental AI models, ushering in a new era of creativity and innovation. By harnessing AWS’s advanced infrastructure and technology, Leonardo.AI aims to lead the conceptual AI content creation sector globally.
To provide users with enhanced flexibility, Leonardo.AI recently launched an iOS mobile application, enabling users to modify the style and tone of uploaded images conveniently on their mobile devices. For instance, an interior designer can upload a photo of a furnished room and use Leonardo.AI to reimagine the space—updating decor, changing color schemes, or adopting specific styles using custom AI models or additional cues from the designer.
To meet the escalating demand for AI-generated high-quality images, Leonardo.AI developed an API, allowing companies to seamlessly integrate Leonardo.AI’s systems into their software environments, incorporate unique AI models, and execute cutting-edge conceptual AI operations tailored to their production needs. The API empowers Leonardo.AI to provide customers with access to specialized content, including bespoke AI models aligned with specific requirements and brand guidelines.
In September, Leonardo.AI integrated its API with its first enterprise customer, Razer, a prominent global lifestyle brand for gamers based in Singapore, to introduce Axon Create. This tool enables Razer users to create personalized high-definition wallpapers for their PCs on demand using generative AI.
Quyen Quach, Razer’s Vice President of Technology, emphasized the importance of simplifying customization for clients, with Leonardo.AI being a natural fit for Axon Create. Leonardo.AI’s proficiency in gaming language aligns with Razer’s ethos of “for enthusiasts, by gamers,” facilitating the creation of artwork that resonates with players’ interests.
Regarding Australian Amazon Web Services
Since establishing the AWS Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region in 2012, AWS has demonstrated a long-term commitment to its Australian clients and communities, investing over \(9.1 billion in the country. Additionally, AWS has announced plans to invest more than \)132 billion in local infrastructure and is set to launch the Asia Pacific (Melbourne) Region in 2023. By 2027, this region is projected to create over 11,000 jobs annually, contributing an estimated $35 billion to Australia’s GDP by 2027. These investments will drive economic growth, foster technological advancements, and enhance various sectors, including online skill certification and training. AWS has provided cloud skills training to over 300,000 individuals in Australia since 2017, with headquarters in major cities such as Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.
Switching to renewable energy is a key strategy to reduce carbon emissions, and in 2022, Amazon sourced 90% of its energy consumption from renewable sources. As the leading corporate buyer of solar power globally, Amazon has initiated over 400 projects worldwide and aims to power its operations entirely with renewable energy by 2025. Amazon’s commitment to renewable energy extends to its business practices, fulfillment centers, and AWS data centers, supporting millions of customers worldwide. In Australia, Amazon has invested in three new energy projects that will generate 717,000 MWh of solar energy annually, equivalent to the average annual electricity consumption of an American household.
Regarding Amazon Web Services
Since its inception in 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the most comprehensive and widely utilized cloud platform. With plans to introduce 15 additional Availability Zones and five new AWS Regions in countries like Canada, Germany, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Thailand, AWS offers over 240 fully featured services spanning various domains such as compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, application development, deployment, and management across 32 geographic regions. Millions of customers, including major enterprises, fast-growing startups, and government entities, rely on AWS to power their infrastructure efficiently and cost-effectively. For more information on AWS, visit www.amazon.com.
