Meta and Amazon Web Services have partnered to support early-stage U.S. startups building artificial intelligence applications using Meta’s Llama model, offering technical guidance and significant cloud resources.
The initiative, announced Wednesday at the AWS Summit in New York City, will give 30 selected startups six months of engineering support and $200,000 each in AWS cloud credits. The program targets founders aiming to create innovative tools powered by open-source AI.
“We have a long-standing relationship and partnership with Meta, and what we’re aiming to do here with the Llama collaboration is really empower founders to build transformative AI using Llama models,” said Jon Jones, AWS vice president and global head of startups and venture capital.
Meta has aggressively pushed into AI, recently forming a superintelligence team and investing $14.3 billion in AI startup Scale, hiring its CEO Alexandr Wang and other top talent. The new program could help Meta expand Llama’s reach and attract developers to its ecosystem, challenging proprietary systems like ChatGPT and Claude.
“Startups are some of the most creative forces in tech, and we’re looking forward to seeing how they’ll use Llama to push boundaries, explore new frontiers, and shape the future of AI in bold and unexpected ways,” said Ash Jhaveri, Meta’s vice president of AI partnerships.
Startups will be selected later this summer based on the potential impact of their ideas and technical capabilities.
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