DeepSeek-R1 Now Available on AWS in Canada and Beyond

Amazon on Thursday announced that DeepSeek-R1 and other models from the Chinese AI startup are now available on Amazon Web Services in Canada and beyond.

DeepSeek has disrupted the AI industry with competent yet supposedly built-on-a-shoestring models that offer performance comparable to established models from the likes of OpenAI, Google, and Meta at a fraction of the cost. The company debuted its DeepSeek-V3 model back in December and introduced DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero with 671 billion parameters, alongside DeepSeek-R1-Distill models ranging from 1.5–70 billion parameters, earlier this month.

DeepSeek’s models have impressed experts with their capabilities and are reportedly 90-95% cheaper than existing competitors. According to the company, DeepSeek-R1 has exceptional reasoning capabilities developed through an innovative training technique known as reinforcement learning. DeepSeek’s AI assistant recently overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the #1 free app on the App Store.

Not only does DeepSeek offer a price-to-performance ratio that puts incumbents to shame, but it has also shaken market confidence in Western AI giants and their relatively massive AI development budgets.

Amazon is adding DeepSeek’s cost-effective DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero models to AWS. “With AWS, you can use DeepSeek-R1 models to build, experiment, and responsibly scale your generative AI ideas by using this powerful, cost-efficient model with minimal infrastructure investment,” the company said in a blog post announcing the launch.

“You can also confidently drive generative AI innovation by building on AWS services that are uniquely designed for security.”

AWS customers can deploy DeepSeek-R1 models in several different ways:

1. Amazon Bedrock Marketplace for the DeepSeek-R1 model
2. Amazon SageMaker JumpStart for the DeepSeek-R1 model
3. Amazon Bedrock Custom Model Import for the DeepSeek-R1-Distill models
4. Amazon EC2 Trn1 instances for the DeepSeek-R1-Distill models.

Amazon also touted enterprise-grade security features in Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker to protect your data and AI endeavours. You can check out Amazon’s blog post for pricing and more details.

Despite OpenAI’s claims that DeepSeek used ChatGPT to train its models, the Chinese company’s cheap yet capable offerings are quickly gaining adoption. Microsoft on Thursday also announced DeepSeek-R1 support on Windows Copilot+ PCs.