Author: Dave Levy

Last year, AWS launched the AWS Public Sector Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) Impact Initiative, a two-year, $50 million investment designed to help public sector organizations accelerate innovation using AWS generative AI services. Today, we’re excited to share the remarkable progress we’ve made and highlight how organizations are utilizing AWS technologies to transform operations and deliver better outcomes for the communities they serve.

Global leaders are convening in Germany this week at the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC) to discuss key foreign policy and security challenges. Amid these discussions, one thing is clear: global leadership increasingly hinges on technological progress. In particular, the rapid progress of artificial intelligence (AI) presents an extraordinary opportunity for transformative innovation. For the U.S. government, this moment marks a crucial inflection point: embrace bold modernization of digital infrastructure and AI investment or risk being outpaced by global competitors.

Digital public infrastructure (DPI) describes the foundational digital capabilities nations provide to facilitate efficient and secure interactions within society, such as proving identity, paying for goods and services, proving an entitlement, or sharing data. DPI is a country’s digital backbone, rapidly enabling modern and responsive government, increasing inclusion and economic participation, and stimulating innovation across all sectors. This post provides several compelling examples of governments worldwide that are benefitting from DPI.

While global leaders convened for the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) in New York, Dave Levy, Amazon Web Services (AWS) Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector, met with business leaders, diplomats, and civic organizations to discuss AWS’s innovative approach to tackling global challenges. He delivered a fireside chat at the Concordia Annual Summit, and joined the Atlantic Council for two panels, where he shared AWS’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services as key examples of how the company harnesses technological advancement to drive global impact. Read this post to learn more.

On June 27, 2024, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Atlantic Council Geotech Center co-hosted an event, “An Allied Approach in the Age of AI,” during the annual AWS Summit Washington, DC. The event convened senior U.S. Government (USG) officials, allied nations’ diplomats, and private sector leaders to discuss approaches to shape the global future of responsible artificial intelligence (AI). This post is a recap of the event, which covered a range of topics including forging effective public-private partnerships, aligning AI governance strategies with allies, debating opportunities and challenges in the age of AI innovation, and building responsible, resilient AI systems. 

Announced today by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the two-year, $50 million investment is designed to help public sector organizations – and those that directly support their technology needs – to accelerate innovation in support of critical missions using AWS generative AI services and infrastructure, such as Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, Amazon SageMaker, AWS HealthScribe, AWS Trainium, and AWS Inferentia.

In 2021, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) announced the creation of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract—a multi-vendor acquisition vehicle designed to make cloud services and capabilities available at all classification levels and across all security domains, from the enterprise to the tactical edge. JWCC will enable the DoD to fully leverage the capabilities of the cloud to meet current and future mission initiatives. Further, JWCC is key to enabling critical warfighter capabilities, such as the Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), and the DoD Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration Initiative (ADA). As the DoD continues to modernize the way it supports the warfighter and defends our national security, AWS is committed to supporting its critical mission.

This year, to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19, the Biden administration committed to making free COVID-19 test kits available to U.S. households through covidtests.gov. AWS is honored to support this initiative by working with the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to make sure the website for test kit ordering meets nationwide demand.

On April 1, the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) released the 1950 Census data to the general public. Census data is released 72 years after a census is conducted, and it has been 10 years since the last census data for the 1940 Census was publicly released. With the support of cloud technologies, this release marks a number of important firsts. AWS is honored to support the release of the 1950 Census and help make this data available to the public.

Ten years ago, the federal government was only just beginning to adopt cloud computing services. In the early days, there were concerns about how much cloud services would cost and whether they’d be secure enough for sensitive government data. In listening to our government customers, we heard their concerns about cost and security. They also needed to innovate ahead of demand, and required a highly secure and compliant infrastructure to do it. That’s why we launched AWS GovCloud (US) in 2011.