# SageMaker AI adds SOCI indexing to cut container image download time for training jobs

> Original title: Announcing SOCI-indexed images for faster SageMaker AI jobs

- Source: AWS Machine Learning Blog
- Published: 2026-10-27T17:00:39.000Z
- Bad Influence: https://badinfluence.news/items/i2sxq2r1zfejqlnk9unz81u64
- Original: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/announcing-soci-indexed-images-for-faster-sagemaker-ai-jobs/

## Summary

AWS announces Seekable OCI (SOCI) indexing for Amazon SageMaker AI training and processing jobs, which lazy-loads container images and starts containers without waiting for the full download. In AWS benchmarks on eight images from 1.8 GB to 35.4 GB, lazy loading took 3–11 seconds, against 48 seconds to 7 minutes 17 seconds for standard downloads. AWS says training performance is unaffected beyond a first-epoch penalty.