AWS Launches $500 Million Effort for Student Cloud Builders

Amazon has launched an education program for college students centered around its cloud computing business.

Student Rewards on AWS (Amazon Web Services) Builder Center, gives students access to earn AWS, 12 months of premium Skill Builder, and an AWS Certification Foundational exam voucher as they learn, build and connect in the community, the company announced Thursday (Aug. 20).

“The initiative represents a commitment of more than $500 million in resources to support university students globally with the training, tools, and certification they need to start building careers in cloud and AI,” Amazon said in its announcement.

AWS Builder Center is a community for developers offering workshops to learn AWS, as well as the ability to read and publish articles and showcase their work and a chance to connect with other developers around the world.

“Student Rewards build on this foundation, giving verified students exclusive access to credits, premium content, and certification vouchers as they engage,” AWS said.

The program follows Amazon’s announcement earlier this summer of a series of multi-billion dollar cloud/artificial intelligence (AI)-focused public sector initiatives.

These include a $1 billion cloud incentive program for the U.S. intelligence community, and a $1 billion investment in Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE).

As covered here, this is “a new global organization that will put thousands of engineers on-site with customers to co-develop AI solutions” aimed at “accelerating the development of AI applications from months into days.”

In other Amazon news, PYMNTS wrote recently about a new capability by the company’s Alexa for Shopping, combining photographs, conversations and purchasing history to provide personalized recommendations.

It’s part of a larger push by Amazon around conversational commerce driven by AI that the report said represents an attempt to automate one of the most valuable behaviors in retail: recurring demand.

While a product like a television might be purchased once every several years, “milk disappears every few days, bananas ripen, yogurt runs out and dog food gets low,” PYMNTS wrote, arguing that this represents a major strategic problem for Walmart, Amazon’s chief retail rival.

“Amazon is trying to move competition in grocery away from the place where Walmart is strongest such as stores, inventory and local fulfillment and toward a new layer of retail that barely existed a few years ago,” the report said. “This new layer is, of course, the AI agent or machine-generated decision about what a household should buy in the first place.”