AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Transform at 1 year, Claude Platform on AWS, EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances, and more (May 18, 2026) | Amazon Web Services
AWS’s May 18, 2026 roundup highlights the rapid expansion of AI-assisted modernization, cloud infrastructure, and developer tooling. AWS Transform reached its first anniversary after processing billions of lines of code and migrating hundreds of thousands of servers, while new services provide direct Claude access, stronger Mac development hardware, improved analytics, and automated security remediation. The roundup also covers multicloud connectivity, AI research funding, community events, and startup credits. ## AWS Transform Reaches Its First Anniversary - AWS Transform launched a year earlier for modernizing .NET, mainframe, and VMware workloads. - New capabilities include: - Custom AWS-managed or user-defined code transformations - Language and framework upgrades - Performance optimization and code analysis - Full-stack Windows modernization - Mainframe reimagining and automated testing - In its first 12 months, customers: - Migrated hundreds of thousands of servers - Saved more than 1.6 million hours - Processed over 4.5 billion lines of code - AWS Transform agents are now available in Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex. ## Major Product Launches - **Claude Platform on AWS:** Provides Anthropic’s native Claude APIs, console, and beta features through existing AWS accounts and billing. Anthropic operates the service, and customer data is processed outside the AWS security boundary. - **EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances:** Use Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio hardware with a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, and 256 GB of unified memory. Compared with M4 Max instances, they offer more CPU, GPU, Neural Engine cores, and memory for parallel Xcode simulators and on-device machine learning. - **Redshift RG instances:** AWS Graviton-based instances run workloads up to 2.4 times faster than previous RA3 instances while costing 30% less per vCPU. They include a vectorized engine for Apache Iceberg and Parquet data. - **Bedrock Advanced Prompt Optimization:** Compares original and optimized prompts across as many as five models, helping users improve performance or migrate between models. - **AWS Security Agent repository scanning:** The preview feature analyzes entire codebases and generates fixes linked to specific files and lines. It is free for existing Security Agent customers during the preview. - **AWS Interconnect for OCI:** Enables private, resilient multicloud connections to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The same open specification already supports Google Cloud and is planned for Azure later in 2026. ## Research, Community, and Startup Updates - AWS is investing $110 million in the Build on Trainium program to give university researchers access to purpose-built AI chips. - Research at institutions including UC Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon is open source, allowing improvements to benefit the broader developer community. - AWS Community Days 2026 will take place globally, with agendas organized by local developer communities. - The Kiro Startups Credit program has reopened, offering eligible organizations up to one year of Kiro Pro+ credits applied through AWS accounts. AWS’s latest updates emphasize managed AI tools, faster specialized hardware, automated modernization, and broader support for developers and researchers. Organizations can particularly benefit by evaluating AWS Transform, Bedrock prompt optimization, new Mac instances, and the expanding multicloud connectivity options.
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