Announcing SOCI-indexed images for faster SageMaker AI jobs

Amazon SageMaker now supports Seekable OCI (SOCI) indexing for AI training and processing jobs, enabling lazy-loading of container images. This reduces container startup time from minutes to seconds by fetching only necessary files initially, cutting GPU idle time by up to 90%. SOCI indexing works with AWS Deep Learning Containers or custom images without changing job definitions, lowering costs and speeding up AI workflows.