Amazon to invest $25 million in AI research
Amazon continues pledging resources to support the development of artificial intelligence (AI), including an expansion of its collaboration with Nvidia.
The e-tail giant, which recently completed a $4 billon investment into generative AI developer Anthropic (which is an established Amazon AI partner), is entering a new research partnership with the University of Washington, the University of Tsukuba in Japan, and leading generative AI platform Nvidia.
As part of this new 10-year collaboration, Amazon will invest $25 million to support four key annual programs:
- AI research funding to be awarded through an annual call for proposals.
- Funding post-doctoral and PhD fellowships to support promising researchers at each university.
- A 10-week undergraduate summer research program to encourage students’ interest in AI research in both the U.S. and Japan
- A three-week entrepreneurship bootcamp program.
The partnership was announced at a signing ceremony at the U.S. Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C. on April 9. It is part of a $110 million strategic initiative supported by leading U.S. and Japanese technology companies and universities to advance AI.
"These renowned universities–the University of Washington and University of Tsukuba–are known for their world-class research and education in AI and computing," said Rohit Prasad, senior VP and head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence at Amazon. "We are excited to partner with them and Nvidia, and for the potential of this partnership to bring together experts across sectors, disciplines, and countries to accelerate critical AI research, and nurture the next generation of AI talent and startup builders."
Amazon continues Nvidia partnership
Amazon has made several steps to work with Nvidia on generative AI development since the beginning of the year. In January 2024, the two companies launched a joint effort to create a tool that identifies product listings where the content could be improved and automatically generates revised content, additional advanced AI tools designed to streamline the creation and editing of product listings, and AI-enabled features to assist fashion shoppers and sellers, such as personalized size recommendations.
And in March 2024, the e-tailer's Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosted cloud services division integrated the Nvidia Blackwell GPU platform into its offering. AWS will offer the Nvidia GB200 Grace Blackwell Superchip and B100 Tensor Core GPUs, extending the companies’ strategic collaboration to deliver infrastructure, software, and services that enable generative AI capabilities.
Together, AWS and Nvidia seek to deliver infrastructure and tools that allow customers to build and run real-time inference on multi-trillion parameter large language models (LLMs) faster, at massive scale, and at a lower cost than previous-generation Nvidia GPUs running on the Amazon EC2 cloud platform.