Today, Amazon is announcing its new AI PhD Fellowship program, which will provide two years of funding to more than 100 PhD students at nine universities researching core AI disciplines such as machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing. The goal of the program is to help drive the innovations that will sign the next step in the development of practical artificial intelligence.
“Amazon’s AI PhD Fellowship program reflects our ongoing engagement with the academic community,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and chief scientist of Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) organization. “We are fortunate to partner with some of the nation’s brightest PhD students who are advancing critical areas of AI—from high-performance chips and hardware to networks, software, foundational models, applications, and more. What makes this program special is how it brings together Amazon’s real-world experience across various industries with the fresh perspectives of these top researchers to invest in the AI talent of the future to invest in future talents. moving the field forward and creating truly useful AI that benefits everyone.”
The program provides $10 million in student funding along with an additional $24 million annually in Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud-computing credits for each of the two academic years 2025-2026 and 2026-2027. That brings the program’s total value to participating universities to $68 million over two years.
Each PhD fellow is also paired with an Amazon mentor, a senior researcher working at Amazon on a topic related to the fellow’s work. Amazon mentors will meet regularly with their fellows to offer guidance and discuss the real-world implications of the fellows’ research.
“Programs like the Amazon AI PhD Fellowship create a powerful synergy,” said Stefano Soatto, a vice president and principal scientist at AWS. “Universities provide the free and open environment where curiosity-driven research flourishes and sows long-term progress, as we conduct problem-driven, customer-focused research that solves real-world challenges at scale. Academics working with us are exposed to a wealth of hard and interesting problems that serve as inspiration for future work, while we support excellent scholarship that can train future students for industry.”
Prominent among the fellows’ research areas are agent systems, which Amazon believes will fundamentally change the way we work and live; large language models and other generative AI models; machine learning systems that reflect Amazon’s interest in developing the most efficient infrastructure to run generative AI models at scale; and automated reasoning, reinforcing Amazon’s belief that automated reasoning tools can help ensure the accuracy of generative AI models’ output and their compliance with policy constraints.
All nine of the participating universities have existing research collaborations with Amazon through the Amazon Hubs program, the Amazon Scholar program, the Amazon Research Awards and other initiatives. The nine universities are Carnegie Mellon University; Johns Hopkins University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign; University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Washington.
“We are excited to partner with Amazon to advance open research in AI,” said Joseph E. Gonzalez, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley and co-director of the university’s Sky Computing Lab. “Through this fellowship, Amazon and UC Berkeley are investing in the next generation of researchers, and I’m excited to see how our PhD students will shape the future of artificial intelligence.”
“UCLA is pleased to join the Amazon AI PhD Fellowship program with 15 outstanding PhD students across seven engineering departments,” said Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, Ronald and Valerie Sugar Dean of the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This transformative support, along with our ongoing partnership through the Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence, will empower our students and faculty members to drive breakthrough innovations in AI that benefit society.”
“By investing in the potential of our students, Amazon not only advances AI research, but helps build tomorrow’s workforce,” said Rashid Bashir, dean of the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “Grainger Engineering, along with our Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, is proud to partner with Amazon and our colleagues to strengthen our innovation ecosystem and ensure a future defined by powerful and practical AI.”
The universities themselves selected the fellows following Amazon’s guidance to prioritize work that promises a significant impact on practical AI problems. Fellows’ funding is intended to cover tuition, stipends and fees. Each university receives $1.1 million per year, and the number of fellows funded varies depending on the universities’ financial agreements with their students.
This initiative underscores Amazon’s commitment to advancing cutting-edge research and development in artificial intelligence and ensuring a robust pipeline of innovation for the future. We look forward to seeing the groundbreaking work these fellows will produce as they collaborate with Amazon’s world-class scientists and engineers.