About this CFP
Amazon invites research proposals addressing science and engineering challenges with the potential for real-world impact within the next three to five years. We seek rigorous work that tackles hard problems where scale matters — research grounded in the constraints of real systems but ambitious about what those systems can become. While proposals must demonstrate scientific depth and technical rigor, we encourage researchers to go beyond incremental improvements and propose new approaches to known, difficult problems.
This call targets research where the path from discovery to impact is visible but not yet traveled. We welcome proposals including, but not limited to, ideas that:
- Address challenges where scale creates difficulty that conventional approaches cannot handle
- Advance responsible research practices, including consideration of societal impact, privacy, security and safety implications
- Propose methods that meaningfully improve on current approaches
- Enable capabilities that complex systems need but do not yet have
- Combine methods across disciplines to solve applied problems
While we welcome proposals from all scientific disciplines, we encourage proposals in areas of applied technical challenges, such as AI for science, cloud and distributed systems, robotics, security and privacy, hardware, sustainability, and health sciences.
This Amazon 2030 track complements our standard Amazon Research Awards program. If your idea aligns with an open Amazon Research Awards call for proposals, submit your proposal directly through that CFP. We welcome proposals here for all topics not covered by open Amazon Research Awards calls for proposal.
Timeline
Submission period: March 25 — May 6, 2026 (11:59PM Pacific Time).
Decision letters will be sent out in August 2026
Award details
Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:
- Unrestricted cash funds, up to $100,000 USD
- AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $70,000 USD on average
- Training and tool resources, including tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers
Awards are structured as one-time unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.
Eligibility requirements
Please refer to the ARA program rules on the rules and eligibility page.
Proposal requirements
Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:
- What hard problem does your research address, and why has it resisted solution at scale? How does your approach differ from existing methods?
- What would make this research impactful rather than incremental? What are the key milestones between your research and practical adoption?
- Why is now the right time to pursue this work? What recent developments or enabling factors make it feasible?
- What are the key risks and how will you mitigate them? What safety considerations or potential dual-use concerns does your research raise, and how will you address them?
- How might your research advance the field broadly? What are potential applications of your work that could benefit society, including potential applications at organizations like Amazon?
Selection criteria
Proposals will be evaluated on the scientific quality and novelty of the research, technical feasibility of the proposed approach, potential for real-world impact at scale, and readiness of the work to deliver meaningful outcomes.
Expectations from recipients
To the extent deemed reasonable, award recipients may acknowledge support from ARA (e.g., “Research reported in this [publication/press release] was supported by an Amazon Research Award, [Cycle /Year].“). Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.