AWS Allocates 230 Million USD Funds To Help Generative AI Startups

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com's cloud service, Inc., (photo: x @awscloud)

JAKARTA Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon.com's cloud service, Inc., Wednesday, June 19 announced the allocation of funds of 230 million US dollars (Rp3.7 trillion) to help startups worldwide develop a generating artificial intelligence (AI) application. This funding will include AWS credit as well as mentoring and training for startups, particularly those in the early stages, to increase the use of AI technology and machine learning (ML).

Part of the funds will be used for the second batch program of AWS Creative AI Accelerator, which provides direct guidance from experts and credits of up to US$1 million (Rp. 16.4 billion) to each of the 80 best early-stage startups that use a generating AI to solve various complex problems. Registration for this program is open from today until July 19.

For more than 18 years, AWS has helped more startups to build, launch and develop their business compared to other cloud providers. It's no coincidence that 96% of AI/ML startups also hold unicorn titles using AWS," said Matt Wood, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence Products at AWS.

"With this new effort, we will help startups launch and develop world-class businesses, providing the basics they need to create new AI applications that will affect how to learn, connect, and do business in the future," he explained.

Interested startups can learn more about how to get funding through the official AWS website. The credits offered can be used to access AWS computing, storage, and database services. In addition, these credits can also be used to access AWS Trainium and AWS Inferentia2, AI chips that offer high energy efficiency and performance at affordable prices, as well as Amazon Sage Maker services to build and train their own foundational model (FM).

The AWS Genrative AI Accelerator program is looking for the best startups that use generative AI to solve complicated problems in various fields such as financial services, health and biological science, media and entertainment, business, and climate change.

The 10-week-long program will pair participants with business and technical mentors based on their industrial fields, as well as provide AWS loans of up to $1 million to help them build, train, test, and launch their generative AI solutions.

AWS will announce the selected startup for the second wave on September 10. The program will start on October 1 with face-to-face sessions on Amazon campus in Seattle. The 80 participating startups will be invited to showcase their solutions to potential investors, customers, partners and AWS leaders in December 2024 at a re-invent in Las Vegas.

AWS has a very important role in helping us to scale up from our generative AI platform to meet the high demand from our users around the world. Thanks to their comprehensive generative AI infrastructure, we were able to reduce the cost of inference by 60% and accelerate the speed of our language model inference by up to 35%," said Jachin Bhasme, co-founder and COO of Leonardo.AI, one of the startups participating in the first wave program.