Amazon Web Services (AWS) is putting $100M worth of AI and cloud technology into health projects for underserved communities around the world. The AWS Health Impact Initiative will run for five years.

Rather than cash, organisations receive credits to use AWS's AI tools, AI agents and cloud computing. Health charities, government bodies, researchers and companies can all apply, from early prototypes to full services.

The aim is to stop the gap in health care from growing as AI spreads. According to the World Economic Forum, generative AI use will grow faster in health care than in any other sector. If organisations serving poorer communities fall behind, AWS warns, health inequalities will widen.

“Agents and AI are revolutionizing health services, but these transformative technologies too often don't reach the communities that need them most unless organizations know how to access and deploy them,” said Dr. Rowland Illing, chief medical officer and director, Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS. 

Too often, however, these tools do not reach the communities that need them most, Illing added. The initiative is meant to help the organisations that serve them build with AI.

Although the programme funds health projects of all kinds, it focuses on three areas. The first is wider access to care, from community health workers to hospitals, especially in rural areas and in low- and middle-income countries.

The second is research into women's and children's health. Only 5% of health research funding goes to women's health, and up to half of the medicines given to children have not been clinically tested on them, AWS said. The third is access to healthy food, as a quarter of children worldwide have stunted growth because of poor nutrition.

Among current users, Eve's Ark saves women's health research data that might otherwise be lost when labs close or grants end, and has stored a petabyte of it so far.

In India, the Akshaya Patra Foundation uses AWS to run kitchens that serve school meals to more than 2.35 million children each school day.

Successful applicants get credits based on their estimated costs, or up to $10,000 to get started. The credits last 12 months and can be extended to 24.

The programme follows AWS's Health Equity Initiative, launched in 2021, which gave $60m in credits to more than 400 organisations. Since then, AWS says it has supported more than 600 health groups in over 80 countries.

The launch also adds to Amazon's wider push into health care. Its Health AI assistant recently opened to all US customers, and it has launched an AI Bio platform for early drug discovery.