Upstage and AWS Launch AI Initiative for Nonprofits and Educational Institutions

Upstage and AWS have launched a joint program called the AI Initiative to help educational institutions and nonprofit organizations adopt generative AI. Selected organizations can use Upstage's Solar and Document AI APIs free of charge, and AWS will support cloud infrastructure and application development costs.

The program focuses on expanding AI adoption across Korean society. Applications are open starting today, with the application period running until March 31, 2026. Organizations with little AI experience will also receive 1:1 mentoring, training, and hands-on resources.

Upstage's flagship LLM, Solar, was trained on AWS infrastructure and Amazon SageMaker, and the 22B-parameter model Solar Pro uses the Depth-Up Scaling (DUS) method to improve GPU efficiency and performance on complex tasks.

Key details are as follows.

• Free API access: Solar, Document AI
• AWS support: Waived infrastructure and application development costs
• Target: Universities, nonprofits, NGOs
• Additional support: Mentoring, training, hands-on materials

Upstage continues its collaborations with Seoul National University, KAIST, Sogang University, Yonsei University, and others. As part of this initiative, it will co-host a global LLM Hackathon with Minerva University in the US, and AWS will support participant education through AWS Skill Builder and PartyRock workshops.

This announcement extends the Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) signed in June 2024. Upstage launched Solar Pro on AWS in December 2024, and the model is now available globally through Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, SageMaker JumpStart, and AWS Marketplace.