AWS is going all-in on its efforts to help startups take advantage of generative AI, providing $500,000 in free credits to use on AI models.

AWS offers a number of third-party AI models on its Bedrock platform, including Anthropic, Stability AI, Mistral AI, and more. The company previously provided $6 billion to AWS Activate-partnered startups—to the tune of $100,000 in free credits each—to help them “experiment on the AWS cloud with little-to-no upfront cost.”

AWS is building on that success by increasing the amount of credits to $500,000 per startup, and making the credits redeemable for third-party models.

“With virtually every startup quickly becoming an AI startup, our partnership with AWS has never been more relevant to the companies getting into our program,” said Michael Seibel, Group Partner at Y Combinator. “AWS has been a long-standing partner and a relentless advocate for our founders, helping them with hands-on support and access to the tools they need to build the products and services people all over the world use and love.”

The company outlined the criteria for the package:

For the latest Y Combinator cohort (January 2024), AWS put together an exclusive package of benefits to help startups reduce upfront costs and get access to reliable, high-performance infrastructure to build their generative AI applications on. This includes $500,000 in AWS credits that can be used for:

• AWS Trainium, our purpose-built chip for training deep learning models, which offers up to a 50% cost-to-train savings over comparable Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances;
• AWS Inferentia, a chip designed to enable models to generate inferences more quickly and at lower cost, with up to 40% better price performance;
• Reserved capacity of up to 512 NVIDIA H100 GPUs via Amazon EC2 through Capacity Blocks for Machine Learning, which dramatically increases GPU availability and ensures startups have reliable, predictable, and uninterrupted access to the GPU compute capacity required for their critical machine learning (ML) projects;
• and now third-party FMs on Amazon Bedrock.

AWS says 80% of Y Combinator-funded companies run on AWS, and the company clearly wants to ensure that the next generation of AI-powered startups continue to depend on it.