Today, Amazon is announcing its new AI PhD Fellowship program, which will provide two years of funding for more than 100 PhD students at nine universities who are pursuing research on 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 underwrite the next step in the evolution of practical AI.
"Amazon’s AI PhD Fellowship program reflects our ongoing commitment to the academic community,” said Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist in Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) organization. “We're fortunate to collaborate with some of the nation's brightest PhD students who are advancing critical areas in AI — from high-performance chips and hardware to networking, software, foundation models, applications, and more. What makes this program special is how it brings together Amazon's real-world experience across diverse industries with the fresh perspectives of these top researchers to cultivate the next generation of AI leaders. We believe investing in future talent is essential to moving the field forward and creating truly useful AI that benefits everyone.”
The program provides $10 million in student funding, along with another $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 the participating universities to $68 million over two years.
Each PhD fellow is also paired with an Amazon mentor, a senior scientist working at Amazon on a topic related to the fellow’s work. Amazon mentors will meet regularly with their fellows to offer guidance and to 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 distinguished scientist in AWS. “Universities provide the free and open environment where curiosity-driven research flourishes and seeds long-term progress, while we conduct problem-driven, customer-obsessed 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 fellowships so universities can educate outstanding students into the industry leaders of tomorrow."
Prominent among the fellows’ areas of research are agentic systems, which Amazon believes will fundamentally change how we work and live; large language models and other generative-AI models; machine learning systems, reflecting Amazon’s interest in developing the most efficient infrastructure for running 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’ outputs and their conformance to policy constraints.
All nine of the participating universities have existing research collaborations with Amazon, through the Amazon Hubs program, the Amazon Scholar program, Amazon Research Awards, and other initiatives. The nine universities are Carnegie Mellon University; Johns Hopkins University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Illinois–Urbana Champaign; the University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Washington.
"We are thrilled to partner with Amazon to advance open research in AI," said Joseph E. Gonzalez, a 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 am excited to see how our PhD students will shape the future of artificial intelligence.”
"UCLA is excited to join Amazon’s AI PhD Fellowship program with 15 outstanding doctoral students across seven engineering departments,” said Ah-Hyung “Alissa” Park, the 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 groundbreaking innovations in AI that benefit society.”
“By investing in our students’ potential, Amazon is not just advancing research in artificial intelligence but is helping build the workforce of tomorrow,” 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 peers to strengthen our innovation ecosystem and ensure a future defined by a powerful and practical AI.”
The universities themselves have selected the fellows, following Amazon’s guidance to prioritize work that promises a substantial 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 according to the universities’ financial arrangements with their students.
This initiative underscores Amazon's commitment to fostering 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 that these fellows will produce as they collaborate with Amazon's world-class researchers and engineers.
