AWS Expands Funding for the Compute for Climate Fellowship and Opens Applications for 2025 Cohort

AWS and IRCAI are expanding the Fellowship to accept up to 20 companies and provide up to $4 million USD to help selected companies bring their ideas to life. The program funds projects that leverage advanced cloud computing, including generative AI and high performance computing, to solve some of the biggest challenges in the fight against climate change. Applications are open through April 6, 2025 for the new cohort.

The world needs solutions to the climate crisis, as temperatures in 2024 hit record highs of 1.29°C above the 20th-century average. In 2024, our planet experienced a series of major natural disasters caused by climate change, according to the scientific community, such as the flooding of hundreds of towns in Brazil, deadly heatwaves with temperatures above 48oC across West Africa and the Sahel region, $80B USD in damages via Hurricane Helene in the United States, and catastrophic floods in Spain.

As global temperatures rise, AWS is stepping up our support for climate tech startups by expanding the AWS + IRCAI Compute for Climate Fellowship. Startups are the lifeblood of innovation, and climate tech startups in particular are playing a critical role in leading new and innovative solutions to address the climate crisis. Startups are inventing groundbreaking new science and technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, remove carbon from the atmosphere, and help the world adapt to and prepare for the impacts of climate change. These companies are leading the way in creating sustainable solutions that can help solve some of the most pressing challenges of our time. At AWS, we believe we can enable these startups to move even faster, by providing them access to advanced computing services, like high performance computing (HPC), artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), and generative AI, as well as guidance from our experts to help them build these solutions efficiently and with confidence. 

Doubling the funding for the Compute for Climate Fellowship

In 2023 we launched the Compute for Climate Fellowship in partnership with the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence (IRCAI), an organization under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The Compute for Climate Fellowship was a first-of-its-kind global R&D funding program providing grants in the form of AWS credits for groundbreaking proof of concepts (POCs) that think big and innovatively use advanced cloud computing like generative AI and high performance computing, and enable the world to more quickly address the climate crisis. Each Fellow company accepted into the program builds a groundbreaking POC climate solution that is funded by AWS, with technical and scientific advisors from AWS and IRCAI.Now, we are thrilled to announce that we’ve opened applications for the 2025 fellowship cohort, the third year of the program. As the effects of climate change are felt across the world, AWS and IRCAI are proud to more than double the program’s size and accept up to 20 companies from around the globe with up to $4 million USD total in funding. This is up from 8 companies and $1.5M USD in 2024.  

Applications for 2025 Compute for Climate Fellowship are now open

Startups can now apply for the 2025 Compute for Climate Fellowship. Applications will be accepted until 11:59 pm EST, April 6, 2025. Applications submitted after that date will be considered for the 2026 Compute for Climate Fellowship.

Like last year, the program is global and startups from all countries can apply. The Compute for Climate Fellowship will select proposals that think big, have the most innovative use of advanced cloud computing, and the biggest promise for global impact. Proposals must address at least one of these following key solution areas in the fight against climate change:

1. Clean energy
2. Low-carbon transportation
3. Sustainable agriculture and food
4. Circular economy/manufacturing/industry
5. Sustainable buildings
6. Greenhouse gas accounting and sustainability management
7. Carbon removal
8. Environment (water, pollution, biodiversity) and climate risk
9. New for 2025 Fellowship: Indigenous Solutions to the Climate Crisis

New Ninth Solution Area: Indigenous Solutions

This year, we are expanding the fellowship’s scope to make it applicable to even more startups around the globe. In addition to the eight solution areas above from 2024, the Compute for Climate Fellowship is seeking proposals for tech-enabled climate solutions that are built by innovators from Indigenous Communities. The Fellowship recognizes that Indigenous People are important leaders in addressing climate change. These communities around the world are both widely impacted by climate change, and at the same time have traditional knowledge, innovations, and practices that offer powerful solutions to the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. The Fellowship is eager to support Indigenous innovators and solutions to the climate crisis and is putting out a call for proposals. More details on the IRCAI Website.

One example of Indigenous Solutions, is Compute for Climate Fellowship company Hum.AI (formerly known as Coastal Carbon), which works closely with Canadian First Nations. Hum.ai’s Compute for Climate Fellowship POC is training generative AI foundational models that can track and monitor biodiversity. Hum.ai partners with First Nations; both parties provide insights that can help with ecosystem restoration. "We [Hum.ai] are excited when we get to engage with First Nation communities for an on-the-ground/in-the-water partner in our coastal monitoring projects," said Thomas Storwick, COO of Hum.ai. "First Nations have been the stewards of these ecosystems since time immemorial, and therefore are often the most effective, knowledgeable, and deeply invested partners we work with. They're also frequently the most affected by ecosystem change, so it's vital to include them as we seek to enable an understanding of our planet and how it changes."

Past Winners

During the first two years of the Compute for Climate Fellowship we accepted some of the world’s most innovative climate tech startups into the program. These include:

2024

• Aigen (U.S.)— improves food quality and reduces agriculture pollution through solar-powered, autonomous weeding robots that offer herbicide-free crop protection and high-resolution insights.
• Asoba (South Africa)—building the first Virtual Power Plant (VPP) in Africa with an AI-driven platform that optimizes distribution, enhances grid resilience, and supports a decentralized, sustainable smart-grid system to meet the continent's demand for clean energy and modern infrastructure.
• Brightband (U.S.)—democratizing weather and climate forecasting by building accessible generative AI-driven tools to improve extreme weather predictions, aiming to save lives and reduce economic impacts.
• Cosma (France)—using underwater micro-drones and AI to deliver scalable, cost-effective environmental surveys of biodiversity on the ocean floor for industries like offshore energy and environmental consulting.
• Matter Intelligence (U.S.)—leveraging a constellation of hyperspectral and thermal imaging satellites with 20x resolution improvement, combined with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high performance computing, to monitor Earth’s natural and built environments and track biodiversity using physics-based models.
• Lithos Carbon (U.S.)—accelerates carbon capture in agricultural soils through enhanced rock weathering, using AI-driven insights to deliver verified carbon credits and scalable climate solutions.
• Smartex (Portugal)—built an AI-powered fabric inspection and a digital management platform, enabling textile manufacturers to reduce waste and improve quality.
• Thea Energy (U.S.)— developing proprietary stellarator fusion technology with simpler, planar (i.e. flat) programmable magnets, eliminating the complexity of prior generations of stellarators to get to commercial scale carbon-free fusion energy faster.

2023

• Hum.AI (Canada)— building generative AI foundational models to track, predict, and protect the natural world.
• Phytoform Labs (U.K.)— developing AI models that invent novel crop genetics to create more climate resilient plants.
• Realta Fusion (U.S.)— developing compact magnetic mirror fusion energy systems to decarbonize industrial heat and power.
• Xatoms (Canada)— a water treatment startup using AI to discover molecules of substances that can easily and affordably purify polluted water.

As part of the Compute for Climate Fellowship, these companies built POCs that have accelerated their R&D and enabled new opportunity for the growth.

For example, through the Compute for Climate Fellowship, Realta Fusion developed the first-of-a-kind plasma stability simulation in the cloud with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) HPC instances, and Elastic Fabric Adapter. Plasma stability is a principal design requirement for fusion power plants. This is groundbreaking because prior to this POC, there were only two super computers in the United States that could handle these simulations, and they are at national labs with a year-long waitlist. With this POC, Realta Fusion demonstrated that the plasma stability simulations can indeed be run in the cloud, which will help democratize access for the whole fusion industry.

“Advances in AWS cloud computing have paved a new pathway for Realta Fusion to expedite research in magnetic confinement fusion energy systems.” said Cary Forest, PhD, co-founder and chief scientific officer at Realta Fusion. “Such intensive plasma physics simulations have never been done in the cloud before. The Realta Fusion team is grateful for this fellowship award and excited to use the power of cloud computing to advance fusion energy research.”

Nicolas Kral, CTO of Phytoform shared that “the Compute for Climate Fellowship is absolutely crucial for Phytoform’s mission of improving sustainability in agriculture. With help from AWS and IRCAI we were able to really accelerate our solution to deploy a unique approach to enhance R&D and secure the food of tomorrow.”

Program Features and Benefits

This year, we are looking for projects of various sizes and sophistication. The fellowship will accept up to 20 companies who will build groundbreaking 2-3 month projects (POCs) addressing the climate crisis using AWS advanced computing. AWS will fund up to $4 million USD in total, in the form of AWS Credits for the Compute for Climate Fellowship. We will look for proposals that can be completed in 2-3 months and that think big, creating novel solutions to address the climate crisis.Through the fellowship, IRCAI and AWS will provide global climate tech startups access to various experts and technical resources to build their POCs, including:

• Grants in the form of AWS Credits to cover the cloud computing costs of the POC
• Three-month POC build period with personalized technical support and mentorship
• Access to advanced computing services, like quantum computing, HPC, and generative AI tools
• Expert guidance in advanced computing, AI, sustainability, and ethics from IRCAI and AWS mentors
• Showcase of results across Amazon, the United Nations, and international bodies

In addition, all POCs will be designed under the guidelines of UNESCO’s Ethics Impact Assessment for AI. This ensures that each solution is built with safe, trustworthy technology.Startups that apply but are not selected to participate will have access to up to $5,000 USD in AWS credits. They will also be invited to join the IRCAI Industrial Club.

To apply for the Compute for Climate Fellowship and find out if your startup is eligible, visit https://ircai.org/ircai-and-aws-climate-fellowship/