Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company , has on last Thursday announced a $230 million commitment for startups around the world to accelerate the creation of generative AI applications.

This will provide startups, especially early-stage companies, with AWS credits, mentorship, and education to further their use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, Amazon said in a statement.

According to the statement, part of the new commitment will fund the second cohort of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a program that provides hands-on expertise and up to $1 million in credits to each of the top 80 early-stage startups that are using generative AI to solve complex challenges.

“For more than 18 years, AWS has helped more startups to build, launch, and scale their business than any other cloud provider—it’s no coincidence that 96 percent of all AI/ML unicorns run on AWS,

“With this new effort, we will help startups launch and scale world-class businesses, providing the building blocks they need to unleash new AI applications that will impact all facets of how the world learns, connects, and does business,” said Matt Wood, vice president, Artificial Intelligence Products at AWS.

According to the statement, Startups can use AWS credits to access AWS compute, storage, and database technologies, as well as AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia, energy-efficient AI chips that offer high performance at the lowest cost.

These credits can also be used on Amazon SageMaker, a fully managed service that helps companies build and train their own foundation models (FMs), as well as to access models and tools to easily and securely build generative AI applications through Amazon Bedrock.

It is noted that the AWS Generative AI Accelerator identifies top early-stage startups that are using generative AI to solve complex challenges in areas such as financial services, healthcare and life sciences, media and entertainment, business, and climate change, among others.

Participants will access sessions on ML performance enhancement, stack optimization, and go-to-market strategies. The 10-week program will match participants with both business and technical mentors based on industry vertical.

Startups will receive up to $1 million each in AWS credits to help them build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions.

They will also have access to industry experts, technology, and technical sessions from NVIDIA, the program’s presenting partner, and be invited to join the NVIDIA Inception program, designed to nurture cutting-edge startups.

AWS will announce selected startups for the second cohort on September 10, and the program will kick off on October 1 with in-person sessions at Amazon’s Seattle campus.

All 80 participating startups will be invited to attend and showcase their solutions to potential investors, customers, partners, and AWS leaders in December at re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas.

Since 2006, AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload.

It now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, ML and AI, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 105 Availability Zones within 33 geographic regions, with announced plans for 21 more Availability Zones and seven more AWS Regions in Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud.

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