AWS wants to raise its profile more emphatically as the premier hyperscaler where GenAI start-ups develop and host their LLMs. To this end, the tech giant is now making available a total of $230 million (€215 million) in free AWS cloud credits.
The tech giant’s new incentive of $230 million in free cloud credits is specifically intended for GenAI start-ups still in the early stages of development. The credits should provide them with the necessary computing power, various LLMs and services to develop their ideas further and sell them through AWS. These things should further help the start-ups be more flexible. Ultimately, this should enable them to realize and scale GenAI solutions faster with the right security, accountability and consistency, the cloud provider indicates.
Additional investment for promising start-ups
A portion of the earmarked $230 million is being spent on the second batch of its Generative AI Accelerator program. This 10-week program, effectively an incubator, seeks to discover the most promising GenAI start-ups. Selected GenAI start-ups receive up to one million dollars in AWS credits, in addition to access to experts from the tech giant, mentoring programs, and introductions to potential investors.
In the 10 weeks, the start-ups have within the program, they can attempt to develop products for various vertical segments. These include the financial services, life sciences, healthcare, media and entertainment, and sustainability sectors. With the AWS credits obtained, the start-ups within the latter program can build, train, test, fine-tune and eventually bring their GenAI LLMs to market, among other things.
Previous free AI cloud credits
AWS is not just offering cloud credits for these specific GenAI start-ups that can be used for AI purposes. Earlier this year, the tech giant expanded its cloud credit program to include free access to LLMs such as Llama 3 by Meta, Cohere, Mistral AI, and Anthropic. All this is in Amazon Bedrock.
Read more: AWS adds Mistral LLMs to Amazon Bedrock