Amazon Web Services (AWS) is investing $100 million to fund a global AI accelerator, aiming to link its machine learning initiatives with experts, customers and partners worldwide. Twilio, Highspot, Lonely Planet and Ryanair are among the first companies to get onboard with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center to develop new applications. “Through free workshops, engagements and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases that will create the greatest value for their businesses, based on best practices and industry expertise,” the company explains.

The concept is “to support work with AWS customers that helps them ideate, design and launch new generative AI products and services,” TechCrunch writes, referring to comments by Sri Elaprolu, head of the new Generative AI Innovation Center and AWS senior data science manager.

“We’ve been hearing from our enterprise customers that they’re very interested in generative AI — and they’re looking to AWS for help and guidance,” Elaprolu added.

The Innovation Center will help businesses identify use cases that will add value, develop proof-of-concept solutions and create products and services that are ready to deploy. It sounds similar to the company’s 2017 move into AI consulting with the ML Solutions Lab.

Participants in the program will have “access to AWS products such as the code-generating service CodeWhisperer and Bedrock platform for text-generating models,” according to TechCrunch.

Targeting clients from financial services to healthcare, media and automotive, the new entity “will initially prioritize working with customers who’ve previously reached out to AWS with ‘plans, goals or requests for assistance’ with generative AI,” according to Elaprolu, TechCrunch notes.

“The goal is to help sell more cloud services,” suggests Bloomberg, “convincing clients to turn to AWS as they build new generative AI applications rather than Microsoft Corp.’s Azure, which has seized an early lead owing to its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, or Alphabet Inc.’s Google, which pioneered much of the early technology underpinning this new frontier.”

The program’s launch follows April’s debut of the AWS Generative AI Accelerator, a 10-week global program for startups. That same month, Amazon debuted Bedrock, which offers pretrained models from AI21 Labs, Anthropic and Stability AI, and also debuted its own LLM, Titan.

TechCrunch points out that AWS also said it is working with Nvidia on a next-generation AI model training infrastructure to bolster its own Trainium deep learning machine.

Amazon says the Generative AI Innovation Center “builds on more than 25 years of deep investment in developing AI technologies” and is “one part of AWS’s overall generative AI strategy to bring this technology to customers and partners around the world.”