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AWS's Weekly Roundup Is Packed: Claude Platform Goes GA and M3 Ultra Mac Lands!

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Hey there, it's Shiichan! I always get excited when the Monday AWS roundup drops a pile of new features at once. Today's edition is extra packed!

AWS Blog aws.amazon.com

What was announced?

I read the AWS Weekly Roundup for May 18, 2026, posted on the AWS Blog and written by Channy Yun of the AWS News Blog. There are three headliners this time.

  • AWS Transform reached its 1-year anniversary
  • Claude Platform on AWS became generally available (GA)
  • The Amazon EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instance, powered by Apple's M3 Ultra, arrived

And there's a stack of other new services and previews too, so it really feels like a roundup!

The story so far

Take Claude Platform. Until now, using Anthropic's models on AWS meant extra work to set up separate contracts and billing. With this GA, you can now reach Anthropic's native Claude Platform (APIs, console, and early-access beta features) directly from the AWS account you already have. Just keep in mind that Anthropic operates the service, and your data is processed outside the AWS security boundary.

What changes

Let's walk through the headliners.

AWS Transform turns one! Over the past year, thousands of customers migrated hundreds of thousands of servers, saved 1.6+ million hours, and processed 4.5+ billion lines of code. What numbers! On top of that, AWS Transform agents are now available through Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex, and there's a new Kiro Powers toolkit for building your own custom transformation agents. Recently it also gained full-stack Windows modernization and mainframe reimagine capabilities with automated testing.

Apple's M3 Ultra Mac is in the cloud! The new Mac Studio-based EC2 Mac instance makes building and testing iOS/macOS apps a lot smoother.

Dive Deep

Here are the specs of the new EC2 M3 Ultra Mac.

  • 28-core CPU / 60-core GPU / 32-core Neural Engine
  • 256 GB of unified memory

Compared with the previous M4 Max, that's 2x the memory, 1.75x the CPU cores, 1.5x the GPU cores, and 2x the Neural Engine cores. It's a great fit for running lots of Xcode simulators in parallel or speeding up on-device ML workflows.

Check out the other new arrivals too!

  • Amazon Redshift RG instances: AWS Graviton-based, up to 2.4x faster than the previous-generation RA3, with 30% lower price per vCPU. They include a vectorized data lake query engine that reads Apache Iceberg and Parquet directly.
  • Amazon Bedrock advanced prompt optimization: optimize prompts for any Bedrock model and compare the original against the optimized version across up to 5 models at once. Handy for model migration or performance tuning.
  • AWS Security Agent full repository code scanning (preview): analyzes your entire codebase with context and returns remediation with exact file and line references. Existing customers pay no extra charge during preview.
  • AWS Interconnect multicloud connectivity (preview): private connections to other cloud providers. OCI is in preview, Google Cloud is GA, and Microsoft Azure is coming later in 2026.

A few smaller notes too. AWS invested $110 million to give university researchers access to AI chips like Trainium (UC Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and more are taking part, with open-source outputs). The Kiro startups credit program reopened, offering up to a year of Kiro Pro+ credits. And AWS Community Days 2026 are happening across the globe!

Wrap-up

  • AWS Transform hit its 1-year mark and is now usable through Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex
  • Claude Platform on AWS went GA, usable directly from your existing AWS account (operated by Anthropic)
  • EC2 M3 Ultra Mac arrived, with 256 GB of memory and a 28-core CPU for smoother iOS/macOS development
  • Redshift RG is up to 2.4x faster and 30% cheaper, Bedrock adds prompt optimization, and Security Agent scans your whole repository (preview)
  • Plus AWS Interconnect multicloud connectivity, chip research investment, and reopened Kiro credits round it out

This one lands for iOS/macOS developers, engineers thinking about data analytics and cost optimization, and teams that want to use Claude on AWS in one place. It'll make you want to give things a try come Monday!

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