Amazon Web Services (AWS) will commit $100 million over five years in artificial intelligence and cloud computing resources to healthcare organisations working to expand access to medical services in underserved communities, as technology companies seek to accelerate the use of AI in clinical care and medical research.
The investment, announced through the AWS Health Impact Initiative, will provide cloud infrastructure, AI tools and agentic AI services to healthcare nonprofits, government agencies, research institutions and technology companies developing solutions to healthcare access and research challenges.
The programme builds on AWS support for more than 600 healthcare organisations across more than 80 countries since 2021. Eligible organisations can apply for assistance at different stages of development, from early prototypes to solutions ready for large-scale deployment.
The commitment comes as healthcare systems face growing pressure from shortages of medical personnel and constrained public resources. The World Health Organization projects a global shortfall of 11 million health workers by 2030, with lower-income countries expected to bear the greatest burden. Africa alone faces a projected deficit of about 5.85 million health workers by the end of the decade, according to WHO regional estimates.
AI could help healthcare providers automate administrative work, support diagnostic processes and analyse medical data, although its impact will depend on access to reliable infrastructure, quality data and appropriately trained personnel.
“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 of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS. “The AWS Health Impact Initiative helps organizations that support those communities to build with AI and extends our commitment to democratize AI and cloud-powered health innovations that benefit everyone, everywhere.”
The initiative will prioritise three areas: expanding access to healthcare services, advancing research and innovation in women’s and children’s health, and improving access to nutritious food.
Under the healthcare access programme, AWS will support projects involving community healthcare, outpatient services, hospitals, diagnostic testing and medical research, particularly in rural communities and low- and middle-income countries. The company said 92% of previous recipients of its healthcare initiative funding had focused on improving access to or the quality of health services, while 53% had incorporated AI or machine learning.
The women’s and children’s health programme seeks to address gaps in medical research and clinical evidence. AWS cites estimates that only 5% of healthcare research funding is directed towards women’s health, while up to half of medicines administered to children lack paediatric clinical validation.
The third area will support technology aimed at improving food distribution, forecasting food insecurity and expanding access to nutritious food. AWS said malnutrition among pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers and adolescent girls had increased by 25% since 2020 in the 12 countries most affected by the global food and nutrition crisis.
In Kenya, several healthcare and technology organisations are using digital platforms to improve patient management, expand access to medical services and support research.
AAR Healthcare is deploying a health management information system across rural hospitals to help healthcare workers manage patient care in economically constrained communities.
Cogni-X Kenya is developing MOYO, an AI-powered wellbeing platform that provides round-the-clock emotional support, clinical assessments, self-help tools and crisis triage, including referrals to local helplines for professional assistance.
Jacaranda Health uses two-way text messaging to help mothers access healthcare services across sub-Saharan Africa, while surgical technology company Proximie is supporting workforce development in East Africa through a digital Community of Practice.
Savannah Informatics operates an electronic medical records platform with about 350 active users, indirectly reaching more than 271,000 people through patient care, data management and health monitoring systems.
TibERbu Healthnet is expanding hospital and pharmacy systems built using Amazon Bedrock across more than 200 facilities that the company says serve 30.4 million Kenyans.
For cloud providers, healthcare offers opportunities to expand demand for AI infrastructure and specialised software services. However, wider adoption of the technology raises questions about patient data privacy, clinical reliability, regulatory oversight and the long-term costs of maintaining digital systems after initial funding expires.
The WHO and World Bank reported in 2024 that about 2 billion people experienced financial hardship from out-of-pocket healthcare spending, while 4.5 billion people lacked access to essential health services. Although digital technology could help providers allocate resources more efficiently, it cannot independently resolve shortages of medical personnel, medicines or healthcare funding.
AWS said eligible organisations could apply through their AWS account teams or a public application portal. Successful applicants will receive cloud credits based on their estimated project requirements, with awards of up to $10,000 available for organisations seeking initial support.
The credits will generally be valid for 12 months, with extensions allowing a maximum period of 24 months. Applicants must explain the problem they intend to address, their proposed solution and the number of people expected to benefit. AWS said applications would be reviewed weekly.
The initiative also extends AWS’s existing work with organisations using cloud infrastructure and AI in medical research, food assistance and data preservation.
US Hunger uses AWS services, including AI tools, to analyse datasets as it coordinates food assistance, healthcare referrals and benefits navigation for families facing hardship.
“Our work starts with community. Technology should never replace human connection—it should strengthen it,” says Ezekiel Brooks, CTO of U.S. Hunger. “Moving our infrastructure to AWS allows us to build a secure, scalable foundation for the work we’re doing in communities. By using AWS serverless analytics, frontier AI, and agentic contact center services, we’re able to manage data responsibly, protect privacy, and deliver services faster and more effectively.”
Eve’s Ark uses AWS infrastructure to preserve women’s health research data and provide researchers with secure access to datasets that could otherwise be lost when laboratories close or research grants expire.
“Every time a lab closes or a grant ends, decades of women’s health data can disappear. Eve’s Ark uses AWS to rescue that data, protect it, and put it back in the hands of researchers, so discoveries that should be possible in 2030 aren’t lost right now,” says Melissa Antal Iftimie, co-founder and CEO of Eve’s Ark. “We started with a small AWS award and a single at-risk dataset. That was enough to prove the model, and now we’re preserving more than one petabyte of women’s health data and building a secure research environment where scientists can work with it to complete the human picture.”