Electric vehicle maker Rivian Automotive Inc. (Nasdaq: RIVN) has chosen Amazon Web Services Inc. as its preferred cloud provider, further strengthening the Irvine company’s ties with the online tech giant.
The automaker said it applies AWS capabilities in analytics, machine learning and other offerings to help streamline its business and improve the performance of its customers’ electric vehicles, including the battery range for the Rivian vehicles.
AWS services will also help in terms of “innovating the technological foundations for customers’ electric vehicle fleet management and more efficient vehicle charging,” Amazon said earlier this month.
A Rivian spokesperson told the Business Journal the company was still in a post-listing “quiet period” after its shares started public trading last month, and was unable to provide further information about the AWS link.
Rivian last month zoomed to a market cap topping $100 billion following its stock market debut, becoming Orange County’s most valuable public company on record, and the year’s largest IPO.
The company’s value approached $105 billion as of late last week.
Amazon remains a major shareholder in Rivian, with a 16.9% stake in the EV maker.
Proacative Diagnostics
AWS said in an announcement that its technology will play a key role in the functioning of Rivian vehicles.
“We have created a software-defined vehicle architecture with a technology foundation that powers advanced features such as deep over-the-air software updates to deliver continuous improvements to the vehicles,” said Wassym Bensaid, Rivian’s vice president of Software Development.
Over-the-air software updates allow for new and improved functionality to be delivered remotely.
Bensaid said in a Dec. 2 announcement that AWS systems also “enable proactive diagnostics and add intelligence to our vehicles.”
The entire vehicle is treated as a single, fully integrated system that is connected to the cloud to allow for remote diagnostics, predictive maintenance, and rapid testing and deployment of new software-powered capabilities to enhance customers’ enjoyment, according to the companies.
Rivian plans to continuously improve features such as “infotainment” options and fleet management resources over the lifetime of its vehicles, according to the announcement.
2020 Link
The partnership between AWS and Rivian started in earnest last year.
In 2020, “Rivian found that its on-premises research and development information technology infrastructure could not keep up with its performance needs,” Amazon said in a case study posted on its AWS website, involving the automaker.
Resource bottlenecks affected product lifecycle management, computer-aided design, and computer-aided engineering, so Rivian began using AWS to architect an agile engineering environment, the case study said,
AWS said the speed of Rivian’s software tools has improved by up to 66%, and Rivian can load a full vehicle bill of materials in 22 minutes.
“People who were skeptical about high-performance computing in the cloud are more open minded after seeing our results on AWS,” said Madhavi Isanaka, Rivian’s chief information officer.
“This is accelerating adoption across the board.”
