Top business executives, software developers, IT executives and other technical decision-makers gathered this week in Las Vegas for one of the most anticipated events of the year.

Running from Monday through Friday, the AWS re:Invent 2022 conference attracted more than 50,000 Amazon Web Services (AWS) customers and partners and over 300,000 virtual attendees from around the world.

The annual event sought to showcase the power of cloud technologies and unveil AWS’s latest solutions, services and upgrades. It also featured an address on global challenges, spearheaded by the economic downturn, supply chains and environmental sustainability.

In his keynote, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky stressed economic uncertainty stemming from inflation, supply chain disruptions, chip shortages and energy prices and shared how the cloud computing giant is focusing on energy production, consumption and sustainability, including water efficiency.

Selipsky revealed that AWS is now the largest corporate purchases of renewable energy, stressing a goal of powering the company with 100% renewable energy by 2025, as he shared new cloud services, servers, software and solutions they developed with their partners aimed at addressing energy, production and supply chain crises.

He said they were launching three new Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances powered by three new AWS-designed chips that can offer customers even greater computer performance at a lower cost for a broad range of workloads.

Selipsky also cited examples of solutions that the company developed with its business partners in sectors such as energy, water scarcity, supply chain and health. He shared examples of how the products and services they have developed for data-driven transformation are used by energy, industrial production, supply chain and health care organizations.

New service for health care data

Selipsky underlined that they will completely switch to the use of renewable energy in 2025 and stated that they will make efforts to make more accurate forecasts in the energy field.

Elaborating on solutions they have developed for the health care sector, he announced the general availability of Amazon Omics, a purpose-built health care and life sciences service used to store, query, analyze and generate insights from genomic data.

"I’m excited to announce the general availability of Amazon Omics, which is designed to help biocommunicators, researchers and scientists create insights from data," he said.

More features for Amazon Connect

Selipsky also cited the company’s customer service-oriented product, Amazon Connect, through which they aim to help companies of all sizes provide customer service at a lower cost, underlining that they have developed an easy-to-use cloud contact center.

"We’re continuing to add more and more machine learning-enabled features to Amazon Connect. Machine learning and machine learning technologies make Amazon Connect smarter at analyzing conversations in real time, finding relevant information, and authenticating customers with their voices," he noted.

Solution to water scarcity

In addition to energy, Selipsky also announced his company’s commitment to water conservation through an initiative to become water-positive by 2030, meaning AWS will return more water to its communities than it consumes through its operations.

"Water scarcity is a major problem worldwide. With today’s announcement of becoming water positive, we are committed to doing our part to help solve this rapidly growing challenge," he said.

Selipsky cited estimates that half of the world’s population would live in areas with water shortages in just a few years.

"That is why, in order to ensure that all people have access to water, we all need to develop new ways to help preserve and reuse this precious resource," he added.

"While we are proud of the progress we have made, we know there is more we can do. We are committed to leading water management in our cloud operations and restoring more water than we use to the communities in which we operate. We know this is the right thing to do, both for the environment and for our customers."

Service for large-scale spatial simulations

Selipsky also announced AWS SimSpace Weaver, a new managed service designed for running large-scale spatial simulations without the constraints of a single piece of hardware or having to manage the underlying compute memory or networking infrastructure.

"With SimSpace Weaver, simulation developers will no longer be limited by the computing and memory of their hardware. Organizations run simulations for situations that are rare, dangerous or too expensive to test in the real world. For example, city managers cannot wait for a natural disaster to occur in the city to test their response systems. Event planners don’t want to wait until a major sporting event to understand the impact of matches on traffic. Such scenarios need to be simulated in a safe environment where planners can test different situations," he said.

He noted that SimSpace Weaver enables the creation of seamless virtual worlds with millions of objects that can interact with one another in real-time without managing the backend infrastructure.

"This means that developers can spend more time building and understanding their simulations and less time deploying and scaling," he said.

"To date, spatial simulations have generally been limited to running on a single piece of hardware. If the developers wanted to simulate a larger and more complex world, where there are a lot of independent and dynamic entities, they had to use a larger computer."