AWS Weekly Roundup: Claude Sonnet 4.6 in Amazon Bedrock, Kiro in GovCloud Regions, new Agent Plugins, and more (February 23, 2026)

This article summarizes AWS announcements and developments for the week of February 23, 2026, highlighting AI, compute, and database innovations.

• Claude Sonnet 4.6 available in Amazon Bedrock for coding and professional work
• Amazon EC2 Hpc8a instances with 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors deliver 40% higher performance
• Amazon SageMaker Inference now supports custom Amazon Nova model deployments
• Nested virtualization enabled on virtual EC2 instances for emulators and simulations
• Amazon Aurora implements server-side encryption by default for all new clusters
• Kiro now available in AWS GovCloud regions for regulated environments
• New open-source Agent Plugins for AWS extend coding agents with deployment capabilities
• AWS DevOps Agent achieves 86% root cause identification rate in production
• Amazon Nova AI Hackathon offers $40,000 in prizes through March 16, 2026
• AWS Summits scheduled in Paris, London, and Bengaluru throughout April 2026

AWS continues advancing AI agent capabilities, infrastructure performance, and security features while expanding developer community engagement through conferences and hackathons.