Grab selects AWS as its preferred cloud provider

The announcement was made during AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas, which brought together tens of thousands of businesses, technology teams, and startups from around the world.

Photo: AWS

Grab is leveraging AWS to pursue a technology-led strategy aimed at accelerating growth across its mobility, deliveries, and financial services verticals, including its new digital banks, while enhancing operational efficiency and reducing IT infrastructure costs.

"At Grab, our strategy for growth is anchored on constant innovation to outserve the needs of our users and partners,” said Suthen Thomas Paradatheth, CTO at Grab. “This requires rapid experimentation, while ensuring security and stability, along with the ability to fully harness the potential of the latest tech like generative AI. We're pleased to extend our partnership with AWS as our preferred cloud partner to continue to support us on this journey."

Driving growth

With AWS, Grab serves 41.9 million monthly transacting users and over 13 million driver and delivery partners registered on its platform. Grab processes over 100 transactions per second, receives more than 500,000 GPS pings, and handles over 50,000 ETA requests every second. AWS underpins Grab’s critical compute, storage, networking, and database functions, enabling it to accelerate innovation, rapidly launch new services, and efficiently scale operations across its eight-country footprint: Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Grab uses AWS Cloud to power the majority of its operations across Southeast Asia, spanning mobility, deliveries, and financial services, including its digital banks in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. By adopting AWS’s cloud-based solutions, Grab has gained agility and reduced operational costs. It uses AWS Clean Rooms for secure, privacy-preserving data collaboration between entities, and has migrated more than 400 backend application services to AWS Graviton2 processors to improve performance and energy efficiency while reducing costs.

To cater to the 22 per cent year-on-year increase in on-demand transactions reported in Q3 2024, Grab uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) alongside Amazon DynamoDB to ensure high availability and scalability. These solutions adapt dynamically to user demand, enabling seamless customer experiences during peak periods, such as holiday sales, while scaling down during off-peak times to save costs. AWS’s infrastructure also supported the rapid launch of digital banks in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia, including GX Bank, which reached nearly one million customers within its first year of operation.

Accelerating AI

As one of the pioneers of AI adoption in Southeast Asia, Grab uses machine learning (ML) to improve user experiences and operational efficiency. Its machine learning model platform, Catwalk, built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), has deployed over 1,000 AI models in production. These models power real-time decision-making for services such as route guidance, pricing, and tailored recommendations, including personalised restaurant suggestions, loyalty rewards, and bespoke financial services.

Grab also uses AWS Inferentia chips for ML inference, enabling cost-efficient deployment of AI-powered services, such as map enhancements and fraud detection in its digital banking operations. AI further drives Grab’s innovations, such as refining last-mile delivery guidance for drivers, which increases productivity and earnings, and creating appetising food descriptions for smaller restaurants, boosting order completion rates and enhancing customer experiences.

Jeff Johnson, managing director, ASEAN at AWS, commented, “AWS is proud to support Grab in its mission to drive innovation and enhance customer experiences across Southeast Asia. By leveraging AWS's unparalleled operational performance, scalability, and cutting-edge technologies, Grab delivers personalised, seamless transactions to millions of users throughout the region. We are excited to continue collaborating with Grab as it navigates the dynamic landscape of ecommerce and superapp development, ensuring it remains at the forefront of innovation in the digital economy.”

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