AWS Weekly Roundup: AWS Builder Center Student Rewards, Las Vegas Local Zone, and More (August 24, 2026)

AWS launched AWS Builder Center Student Rewards for students enrolled in verified higher education institutions. By verifying enrollment through SheerID and completing a profile, students gain access to premium AWS Skill Builder for 12 months, including over 900 courses, hands-on labs, and certification exam prep. Earning badges through activities in the Builder Center allows students to progressively earn AWS credits and AWS foundational certification exam vouchers, with over $500 million in resources allocated for this season.

Infrastructure and service updates were also released. A new AWS Local Zone was added in Las Vegas, Nevada, supporting EC2 C7i, M7i, R7i, and C8gn instances, as well as EBS, ECS, and EKS. Additionally, a fourth Availability Zone (AZ) was added to the Europe (London) region, enhancing AI/ML processing capabilities via Trn3 and P6 accelerated instances.

Amazon Bedrock now supports cross-Region inference for SpaceXAI's Grok 4.6 model and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 models (Sol, Terra, Luna). This allows models to be invoked at lower token costs within specified geographic boundaries or across all commercial AWS regions. Furthermore, the AgentCore payments feature reached General Availability (GA), supporting Coinbase credential provisioning and pay-per-use billing based on the x402 protocol.

In terms of data and developer tools, AWS Glue 6.0 was released, offering a 30% price reduction compared to previous versions and providing a modernized runtime based on Apache Spark 4.1 and Python 3.13. Support for Iceberg v3 improves read performance for semi-structured data using VARIANT data types and deletion vectors. Other updates include support for terminating batch instances in EC2 Auto Scaling and the introduction of a built-in visual file editor in CloudShell.