Amazon Web Services Inc. today committed $100 million worth of artificial intelligence and cloud technology over five years to health organizations working in underserved communities around the world, provided to recipients as AWS credits.

The new AWS Health Impact Initiative is taking aim at a cost problem that AWS says is keeping many of those organizations out of the current wave of AI adoption. AWS points to survey data to explain the focus on credits.

An independent survey of 83 of the more than 400 organizations supported under the company’s earlier AWS Health Equity Initiative found that 60% saw cost as the main barrier to cloud adoption where they operate. Most ranked AWS credits as their highest-priority need. That program began in 2021 with $40 million behind it, and the total had grown to $60 million by the time the last of it was handed out in July 2024.

Timing matters too. A World Economic Forum forecast cited by AWS has generative AI use climbing faster in health care than in any other field. If the organizations closest to underserved patients fall behind on adopting it, AWS argues, health gaps will widen.

Agents and AI are reshaping health services, said Dr. Rowland Illing, chief medical officer and director of health care and life sciences at AWS, and they “too often don’t reach the communities that need them most.” Illing framed the initiative as an extension of the company’s stated aim of democratizing AI and cloud-based health technology.

Any area of health care is eligible, and AWS has singled out three for added weight. The first is access to health services, where AWS wants to support diagnostic testing and stronger health infrastructure in places such as rural areas and low- and middle-income countries.

A second area covers research into women’s and children’s health, with better data and more inclusive studies as the goal. Women’s health draws just 5% of health research funding, the company said, and as many as half the medicines given to children lack pediatric clinical validation.

Healthy food is the third area. AWS said malnutrition among pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and adolescent girls has climbed 25% since 2020 in the 12 countries hit hardest by the global food and nutrition crisis. Projects there could improve food distribution or predict food security patterns.

Recipients AWS highlighted include women’s health data nonprofit Eve’s Ark, which collects research datasets that are at risk of disappearing when a lab closes or a grant ends. Co-founder and Chief Executive Melissa Antal Iftimie said the group started with a small AWS award and “a single at-risk dataset.” The archive now holds more than a petabyte of women’s health data on AWS, and the group is building a secure research environment where scientists can work with it.

In Haiti, primary care provider Care 2 Communities runs a network of community clinics that has served 350,000 people and handles almost 120,000 patient visits a year. Its electronic medical records sit on AWS, which brings centralized, real-time data to clinics in rural parts of the country. School meals for more than 2.35 million children in India come out of kitchens run by the Akshaya Patra Foundation every school day, and the foundation uses AWS to run those kitchens and get meals out to schools.

Eligibility runs well past health charities to government agencies, research institutions and companies, and AWS will consider a project at any stage up to full production.

Organizations with an AWS account team can submit proposals through it, and a public portal is open to everyone else. Each application has to estimate how many lives the project will improve, and AWS goes through submissions every week. Successful applicants receive credits sized to their own AWS Pricing Calculator estimate of what a project needs, or a starting allocation of up to $10,000. Awardees have 12 months to use the credits and can ask to have that window stretched to 24.

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