Amazon says it will commit up to $230 million to startups building AI-powered apps.
The investment, about $80 million of which will fund Amazon’s second AWS Generative AI Accelerator program, aims to position AWS as an attractive cloud infrastructure option for startups developing artificial intelligence models to power their products, applications and their services. Much of the new tranche — including the entire portion earmarked for the accelerator program — comes in the form of compute credits for AWS infrastructure, meaning it can’t be transferred to other cloud service providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
To sweeten the drink, Amazon pledges that startups in this year’s Generative AI Accelerator cohort will gain access to experts and technology from Nvidia, the program’s presenting partner. They will also be invited to participate in the Nvidia Inception program, which provides companies with opportunities to connect with potential investors and additional consulting resources.
The Generative AI Accelerator program has also grown significantly. Last year’s cohort, which had 21 startups, only received up to $300,000 in AWS compute credits, amounting to a total investment of about $6.3 million.
“With this new effort, we will help startups launch and scale world-class businesses by providing the building blocks needed to unleash new AI applications that will impact all aspects of how the world learns, connects and is active,” said Matt Wood. VP of AI products at AWS, said in a statement.
Amazon’s growing spending on AI technology, which includes efforts such as the $100 million AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, free credits for startups using large AI models and it is Project Olympus model, comes as the company tries to catch up with the tech giant’s rivals in the burgeoning — and increasingly competitive — space of artificial intelligence being created. While Amazon claims that its various productive AI businesses have arrived “Multi-billion” in run rate, the company is widely considered to have missed the boat on genetic AI.
AWS initially plans to unveil its own AI production model similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT codenamed Bedrock — which eventually became Amazon’s Background model hosting service — at its annual conference in November 2022, according to The Information. But major bugs forced the organization to postpone the release. (Amazon PR disputes this.)
of Amazon The Alexa division is surrounded by challenges also thanks to technical failures and political infighting, as reported by Fortune’s Sharon Goldman this week. Nine months after a dazzling demo of “next-gen” Alexa, the new Alexa is reportedly far from ready for prime time — the result of insufficient training data, insufficient access to training materials and other obstacles.
Amazon also gave early opportunities to back two leading AI startups, Cohere and Anthropic. The company later tried to invest in Cohere, but was rebuffed — and had to settle for a co-investment (albeit a large one, totaling $4 billion) in Anthropic with arch-rival Google.
In addition to the recent departure of Howard Wright, AWS’s head of startups, who managed startup relationships at the organization, one obstacle in Amazon’s way is growing regulatory scrutiny over Big Tech’s investments in AI startups .
The US Federal Trade Commission recently opened one research about Microsoft’s support for OpenAI, as well as Google and Amazon’s investments in Anthropic. European politicians have signaled they are also skeptical of such deals.
