Amazon CNBC has learned that the value of credits it offers to some new startups for use of its cloud infrastructure will be doubled as the company faces stiff competition from: Microsoft In terms of artificial intelligence services.
Amazon’s cloud division said in an email to venture capital investors this week that starting July 1, new startups that have raised Series A financing in the past year will be eligible to receive $200,000 through AWS’s Activate program. dollars of credit, up from the previous $100,000. AWS said seed-stage startups are still eligible for a $100,000 credit.
Two people familiar with the changes confirmed the credit increase but asked not to be named because the information is private.
Matt Garman, who was recently promoted to AWS CEO after running sales and marketing, will meet with founders in Silicon Valley this week, people familiar with the matter said. Garman told executives that working with startups was always a top focus, one of the people said, adding that Garman described artificial intelligence companies as ideal customers for AWS.
An AWS spokesperson confirmed the points increase and Garman’s visit to Silicon Valley. The spokesman added that where the $100,000 credit used to expire in one year, the $200,000 credit now expires in three years.
Amazon is best known for its massive online retail business, which derives most of its profits from AWS, which it launched in 2006, long before rivals Microsoft and Google entered the market. AWS leads the market, with first-quarter revenue of $25 billion, up 17% year-on-year.
But Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud are growing faster and benefit from rapidly evolving artificial intelligence models. With the support of Microsoft, OpenAI launched ChatGPT on Azure at the end of 2022, and has since attracted a wave of companies large and small to provide artificial intelligence workloads to Microsoft. Google has many large language models, the most famous of which is Gemini.
Amazon has been trying to catch up in the field of generative artificial intelligence, investing billions of dollars in OpenAI challenger Anthropic.
Last month, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky announced his resignation after three years running the company, and Garman was named his successor. While Selipsky was at the helm, Microsoft and Google increased their share of the cloud infrastructure market. One analyst told CNBC that Microsoft is “circling AWS” in generating artificial intelligence.
Startups have long been fertile ground for cloud infrastructure companies as they try to attract ambitious founders who could build the next billion-dollar business.
In November, Microsoft announced a partnership with Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, which will provide participating startups with $350,000 in Azure credits and the use of graphics processing units (GPUs) for training AI models, a spokesperson said. . Microsoft has since expanded the $350,000 credit award to other accelerators, including the AI Grant.
Join a Microsoft startup Founder Center The program requires no prior venture capital and allows for up to $150,000 in Azure credits over four years.
In addition to the Activate product, Amazon has a new 10-week generative artificial intelligence accelerator program. According to the agency, participants will be able to earn up to $1 million in cloud credits website.
Earlier on Friday, Amazon Chief Scientist Rohit Prasad told employees that the company had hired David Luan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence startup Adept, as well as some of Luan’s colleagues. “Amazon also licenses Adept’s agent technology, a family of state-of-the-art multi-modal models, and several data sets,” Adept said in a statement. blog post.
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