Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy.

REUTERS/Mike Blake

Amazon Web Services will offer $20 million work of credits and technical support to customers who are working to develop faster COVID-19 testing.

The initiative will at first focus on COVID-19 – the illness caused by the novel coronavirus – and could expand to other infectious diseases.

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Amazon Web Services on Friday said it will offer $20 million worth of credits and technical support to customers who are working to develop faster COVID-19 testing.

"One area where we have heard an urgent need is in the research and development of diagnostics, which consist of rapid, accurate detection and testing of COVID-19," Amazon said in a statement. "Better diagnostics will help accelerate treatment and containment, and in time, shorten the course of this epidemic."

AWS – Amazon's multibillion-dollar cloud computing unit – is calling it a $20 million initiative to "accelerate diagnostic research, innovation, and development to speed our collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 and other innovate diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks."

Amazon said the funding will come in the form of "in-kind credits and technical support" for customers who are finding ways to use the cloud to tackle challenges related to the crisis.

The program will be open to private companies and accredited research institutions using AWS to develop testing that can be done at home, or provide same-day results at a clinic. The initiative will initially focus on COVID-19, but the company said it will also consider other infectious disease diagnostic products.

The initiative could make it more likely companies and research institutions developing infectious disease diagnostic products choose Amazon's cloud over its competitors, which include Microsoft and Google Cloud.

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