AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Transform 1st Anniversary, Claude Platform on AWS, EC2 M3 Ultra Mac Instances, and More (May 18, 2026)

AWS Transform has established itself over the past year as an agentic AI service for .NET, Mainframe, and VMware modernization. At re:Invent 2025, AWS Transform custom expanded to cover language version upgrades, framework migration, performance optimization, and codebase analysis, and also added full-stack Windows modernization and Reimagine and automated testing for mainframe.

Over the past 12 months, thousands of customers migrated hundreds of thousands of servers, saved 1.6M+ hours, and processed 4.5B+ lines of code. The Transform agent is now available in Kiro, Claude, Cursor, and Codex, and an agent builder toolkit for Kiro is also provided.

Key announcements include the following.

• Claude Platform on AWS: A general availability (GA) release that lets you use Anthropic's native Claude Platform directly within your AWS account. You can use the API, console, and early-access beta features without a separate account, billing, or tracking, but operations are handled by Anthropic and data is processed outside the AWS security boundary.
• Amazon EC2 M3 Ultra Mac instances: Based on the Apple M3 Ultra Mac Studio, these provide a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, and 256GB unified memory. Compared to M4 Max Mac instances, that's 2x the unified memory, 1.75x the CPU cores, 1.5x the GPU cores, and 2x the Neural Engine cores.
• Amazon Redshift RG instances: Based on AWS Graviton, these handle data warehouse and data lake workloads up to 2.4x faster than the RA3 generation, at 30% lower price per vCPU. They also include a vectorized data lake query engine for handling Apache Iceberg and Parquet.
• Amazon Bedrock Advanced Prompt Optimization: Optimizes prompts for any model, and lets you compare the original and optimized versions across up to 5 models simultaneously.
• AWS Security Agent full-repository code scan preview: Analyzes an entire codebase contextually to find vulnerabilities and suggests precise file- and line-level remediation.
• AWS Interconnect - multicloud connectivity with OCI: Private multicloud connectivity for OCI has been added in preview. OCI is the latest CSP to adopt this open spec, with Google Cloud at GA and Microsoft Azure support planned for later in 2026.

Additionally, AWS invested $110 million in the Build on Trainium program to expand AI chip access for university researchers at UC Berkeley, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and others, and also announced the 2026 AWS Community Days schedule and the resumption of Kiro Startups Credit.