AWS commits $100 million to global health AI

Amazon Web Services announced the AWS Health Impact Initiative (HII), a five-year commitment of $100 million in AI, agentic services and cloud infrastructure. The support is in the form of technology rather than cash. Health nonprofits, government agencies, research institutions, industry players and technology companies can apply for help building and scaling health solutions, from prototype to production.

HII follows the AWS Health Equity Initiative, which launched in 2021 and gave $60 million in AI and cloud technology to more than 400 awardees. AWS says that across its programs, it has supported more than 600 health organizations in more than 80 countries since 2021.

HII will fund projects across healthcare, with extra focus on three areas:

• Access to health services, including community and hospital care, diagnostic testing workflows and health infrastructure in rural areas and low- and middle-income countries.
• Women's and children's health research. AWS points out that only 5% of health research funding goes to women's health and that up to half of medicines given to children lack pediatric clinical validation.
• Healthy food access, including optimizing food distribution and predicting food security patterns.

"Agents and AI are revolutionizing health services, but these transformative technologies too often don't reach the communities that need them most," said Dr. Rowland Illing, AWS's chief medical officer.

AWS named some recent awardees. Eve's Ark has saved more than a petabyte of orphaned women's health data on AWS. Admera Health provides genomic sequencing for projects such as tuberculosis surveillance in South Africa. Care 2 Communities serves 350,000 people through clinics in Haiti.

The announcement does not say how awards will be sized or selected, or when applications close.