AWS re:Invent 2026 runs November 30 to December 4 in Las Vegas, and Amazon Web Services has named the speakers for all five of its keynotes: CEO Matt Garman on Tuesday, December 1, and Matt Wood, who rejoined AWS this year as chief AI and technology officer, on Thursday, December 3. The conference spans six venues on the Strip.
The 2026 event is the first since Amazon CTO Werner Vogels gave what AWS called his final keynote, and AWS has folded re:Inforce, its security conference, into it. Garman will cover “AI infrastructure and inference to data, agent platforms, and the software agents AWS is building,” with new announcements, according to AWS’s partner guide to the event.
What AWS says it will cover
AWS says new services launch during the keynotes, though it has not said which, and it lists more than 150 launch sessions where attendees can try them that week. All five keynote descriptions in the session catalog mention AI agents.
Data and AI. “Most teams have agents that shine in a demo and stall before they do real work,” the description says. The keynote covers what changed for the teams that got agents into production: how agents get at data, how their value is measured, and the limits set on them.
Developers. Monday night’s keynote covers building an app in minutes, making agents that work, and trusting code written by someone else, with lessons from an AWS team that built a new service with an “AI software factory.”
Infrastructure. Thursday’s keynote looks at Graviton and Trainium, Amazon’s own processors and AI chips, and at its data center network, its storage, and how it checks that systems work as designed.
Partners. The partner keynote promises migrations run by agents and a demonstration of AWS Marketplace and Partner Central.
Sessions run “across AI, security, migration, developer productivity, and more,” AWS says, and its serverless guide flags sessions on new ways to run Lambda functions, including durable functions and Lambda MicroVMs.
“For 2026, re:Inforce is part of re:Invent,” AWS says. More than 120 security sessions run during the week, and Thursday is a security day at the Wynn of more than 70 sessions, all at the 300 to 500 level. Six security sponsors will be there, among them Accenture, Splunk, Zscaler, and Upwind, which raised a $400 million Series C in October.
Who gives the keynotes
Day (PT) | Keynote | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
Mon Nov 30, 7:30 p.m. | Developer | Clare Liguori |
Tue Dec 1, 8:30 a.m. | CEO | Matt Garman |
Wed Dec 2, 8:30 a.m. | Data and AI | Swami Sivasubramanian, Andy Warfield |
Wed Dec 2, 3 p.m. | Partner | Ruba Borno, with Garman |
Thu Dec 3, 8:30 a.m. | Technical Innovations | Matt Wood |
Source: AWS’s re:Invent agenda, speaker page, and session catalog, read October 29. All five keynotes are at The Venetian and streamed.
Clare Liguori, a senior principal software engineer, gives the developer keynote with AWS engineers and community members AWS calls Heroes. Her focus is Kiro and the Strands Agents SDK, her speaker profile says. Kiro is the AI development environment that AWS said in December 2025 had become Amazon’s standard across the company.
Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president for agentic AI and emerging technologies, leads development of many of AWS’s AI and data services, including Bedrock and SageMaker. He shares Wednesday’s stage with Andy Warfield, an Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer who was quoted when AWS agreed in August to acquire DuckLabs, the company behind the DuckDB database. Ruba Borno, vice president of global specialists and partners, hosts the partner keynote.
The biggest change is on Thursday. Last year re:Invent closed with a keynote from Vogels, his final one after 14 years, AWS said. This year Thursday belongs to Wood, who spent more than 14 years at AWS and 19 months at PwC before returning in a newly created role, GeekWire reported in May. At an AWS employee meeting on September 17, Amazon reported, he said:
What we are doing today at AWS for AI is exactly what we did for cloud computing, to make this technology broadly distributed and democratized for everybody.Matt Wood, chief AI and technology officer at AWS, September 17, 2026
He named Trainium for compute, Bedrock for inference, and AgentCore for agents as the building blocks.
Cost, hotels and deadlines
A full conference pass costs $2,499 as of October 29; early-bird pricing ended August 25. Ten or more passes bought in one transaction are 10% off, or $2,249.10 each. There are no day or Expo-only passes, attendees must be 18 or older, and a guest pass for re:Play, the Thursday night party at Allegiant Stadium, is $350.
The full-refund window closed October 16. Cancellations received by November 23 get 50% back, and later ones get nothing, though AWS can approve a transfer to another person.
Discounted rooms are booked through the attendee portal after registering, and the room blocks close November 5. Five of the six venues are hotels; Caesars Forum hosts sessions only. Discounted rates run from $142 a night plus a $40 resort fee at MGM Grand to $299 plus $35 at Wynn and Encore, before taxes.
Badge pickup opens Sunday, November 29, and the last sessions end at 12:30 p.m. on Friday. By SaasBuzz’s calculation, a pass plus those five nights at MGM Grand comes to $3,409 before taxes and flights; at Wynn or Encore it is $4,169.
AWS advises allowing 30 to 45 minutes between venues, and shuttles and the monorail are free with a badge. Requests for accessibility services, such as ASL interpretation, are due by November 14.
The keynotes stream free. Livestream registration opens November 9, and AWS says it will carry more than 50 sessions live from three theaters. Garman’s keynote starts at 11:30 a.m. ET, and keynotes and breakout sessions go on demand afterward.
What we’ll be watching
OpenAI inside Bedrock. Around the start of October AWS opened a public preview of Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents powered by OpenAI, built on a customized version of OpenAI’s Agents API to run agents inside AWS under a customer’s own permissions. OpenAI and Anthropic are both Emerald sponsors of the event.
Limits on agents. AWS has argued that what an agent may do should be enforced outside it, by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore policies at the gateway, because “an agent cannot turn off a control it does not run.”
Kiro. AWS’s October 5 roundup introduced Kiro workflows, which carry a task from start to finish with several agents and less supervision; AWS said it built most of the feature that way. Liguori’s profile lists Kiro as her focus.
Chips. Graviton5 reached general availability on June 10, about six months after its re:Invent preview, and in October Amazon announced TorchNeuron, which runs existing PyTorch code on Trainium chips with a configuration change. Thursday’s keynote names both.
Security agents. AWS Continuum, generally available since October, reproduces exploitable code flaws in a sandbox and opens fixes as pull requests, each approved by a person for now.
