Amazon To Invest Another $100M In AWS Generative AI Innovation Center

At an event Tuesday aimed at showcasing the capabilities of its web services division, Amazon announced it would invest an additional $100 million in the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center.

In a blog post, Amazon execs Francessca Vasquez and Taimur Rashid wrote that the investment will further the goals of the center, which was established two years ago. Amazon, like fellow tech giants Meta, Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI, has pledged to spend hundreds of billions on AI infrastructure in the coming years. In that context, $100 million isn’t a game-changing amount, but the blog posted said it’s money aimed at developing new business methods.

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AWS, a powerful engine of profit for the tech giant, used to be led by Andy Jassy. The exec was named CEO of Amazon in 2021, succeeding Jeff Bezos.

The innovation center has helped “thousands of customers across industries from financial services to healthcare – including Banco Itaú, Formula 1, Fox, GovTech Singapore, Nasdaq, NFL, Rio Tinto, and RyanAir – from AI experimentation to full-scale deployment, driving millions of dollars in productivity gains and transforming customer experiences,” the blog post said. Using Amazon’s Bedrock as well as a system developed by Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI startup, Warner Bros. Discovery’s European sports arm created Cycling Central Intelligence. The AI tool processes hundreds of documents and databases in order to help mountain bike racing commentators access information through natural language queries. The result was dramatically reduced research time and “enhancing storytelling capabilities,” the blog post said.

The event, titled AI Showcase: Behind the Scenes with AWS Customers, was held in one of Amazon’s New York offices. It consisted of two panels and a tour of the company’s AWS Builder lab, an 8,000-square-foot facility centered on showcasing early-stage technology.

Among the speakers were Dawn Aponte, Chief Football Administrative Officer for the NFL; and Gerard Medioni, VP and Distinguished Scientist, AWS Applications. Medioni, former chair of the computer science department at USC, has worked at Amazon for 10 years. He is a member of the leadership team for Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios. His company bio says he “drives adoption of artificial intelligence in content understanding and applications,” but the panel steered clear of any of the thorny legal and ethical issues confronting Hollywood studios as the AI era dawns.