Pinterest and AWS Sign $4 Billion Deal to Power Visual Search

Pinterest has signed a $4 billion cloud services agreement with Amazon Web Services stretching through 2031, the largest infrastructure commitment the visual discovery company has ever made.

According to a Thursday (June 4) press release from Amazon, the deal extends a relationship between the two companies dating back to 2010.

The scale of the commitment reflects how central AI has become to Pinterest’s core business. Per the release, Pinterest serves more than 600 million monthly users whose primary activity is search and discovery. When search results get worse, users disengage. When users disengage, advertisers pull back.

Pinterest has moved its recommendation systems away from basic keyword and category matching toward artificial intelligence (AI) models that understand visual context and user intent. That shift requires significantly more computing power to train and run at scale.

To handle that demand, Pinterest said it plans to use AWS Trainium, Amazon’s custom chip built specifically for running AI workloads, to power its visual search and personalization features. The chip is designed to cut the cost and time required to run large AI models compared to conventional alternatives.

Pinterest said it is also expanding its use of AWS Graviton processors, which already handle roughly a third of its computing operations, across more of the systems that support its platform.

“Pinterest is heavily investing in AI to make discovery more personal, visual, and actionable for the hundreds of millions of people who use our platform every month,” Pinterest CTO Matt Madrigal  in a statement.

“This expanded commitment with AWS gives us the compute flexibility, hardware optionality, and infrastructure efficiency to accelerate our AI vision for the next generation of visual discovery on Pinterest,” Madrigal added. “This strategic partnership will help accelerate AI innovation at Pinterest, improving both our consumer experience and advertiser performance by advancing our proprietary models and our use of open-source models.”

Pinterest also said it launched Pinterest Assistant, a conversational search feature that lets users refine what they are looking for through back-and-forth queries rather than single searches. The product moves Pinterest closer to the moment of purchase, a gap the company has long worked to close between user inspiration and actual transaction.

The Pinterest-AWS deal lands against a backdrop of accelerating investment across the company. According to a PYMNTS report in May, Pinterest posted $1.008 billion in Q1 revenue, up 18% year over year, above the top of its guidance range. Global monthly active users reached 631 million, a record for the tenth straight quarter. About half of its 80 billion monthly searches carry commercial intent, a ratio that makes the gap between engagement and monetization the central business problem the company is now organized around closing.

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