As COVID-19 cases continue to rise, the world’s largest cloud companies and chipmakers are giving researchers massive compute power for free — and, in some cases investing millions of dollars — to help them better understand the coronavirus, advance testing efforts, and find a cure.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) today committed at least $20 million for COVID-19 diagnostic research and testing via its AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative. This new program is open to accredited research institutions and private entities that use AWS to run research-oriented workloads related to point-of-care diagnostics (testing that can be done at home or at a clinic with same-day results).

While it will initially focus on COVID-19, AWS says it “will also consider other infectious disease diagnostic projects” in the future. The cloud giant will provide funding to participating organizations through AWS in-kind credits and technical support to research teams.

An outside technical advisory group made up of scientists, health policy experts, and “thought leaders in the field of infectious disease diagnostics” will set the initiative’s priorities and help participants securely share their research findings.

In a blog post announcing the initiative, Teresa Carlson, VP of worldwide public sector at AWS, explains why the company is investing in COVID-19 diagnostics and testing versus a vaccine. First, accurate detection is the tip of the spear for any effective pandemic response strategy,” she wrote. “Second, diagnostics research has historically been underfunded and largely deprioritized in favor of a focus on vaccines. Third, organizations working on diagnostics need reliable, scalable compute power, which we can deliver to them along with industry-leading services like analytics and machine learning, so they can process and analyze large data sets and iterate quickly.”

Amazon previously committed $1 million to launch a Washington-based coronavirus response fund. The fund started with $1 million from Amazon, which was matched by fellow Washington cloud giant Microsoft, and grew to more than $9 million in three days.

Amazon’s top competitors Microsoft and Google are also donating cloud computing resources to scientists and researchers working on test kits and vaccines for COVID-19. Yesterday Microsoft, Google, and Rescale began offering high performance computing resources at no cost to researchers. It’s called Tech Against Covid, and it allows researchers to run simulations in the cloud without setup time or IT teams using Rescale’s platform combined with Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure cloud computing resources. Running these massive workloads in the cloud means that researchers don’t need an on-premises supercomputer. Plus, they can contribute and share data from anywhere across the globe.

Life sciences company Bionano Genomics is participating in the program. “Bionano’s genome imaging technology can identify variation in genome structure better than any sequencing-based method, which makes us uniquely positioned to help identify variants in the human genome that can protect against or predispose to the viral infection,” said CEO Erik Holmlin in a statement. “We have set up studies to identify such variants around the globe,” and integrating Bionano’s bioinformatic tools onto Rescale’s high-performance computing platform allows the company to scale up these studies more rapidly across continents.

Meanwhile, China-based cloud giant Alibaba is also making cloud high performance compute resources available for researchers as well as free artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud services to medical personnel around the globe to fight the pandemic. This is a joint effort between Alibaba Cloud, scientists and researchers from Alibaba DAMO Academy, and the technical team at DingTalk, which is one of the UNESCO-endorsed platforms for distance learning during the coronavirus outbreak.

DingTalk’s International Medical Expert Communication Platform, hosted on Alibaba Cloud, provides free video communication and real-time AI translation in 11 languages for medical workers all over the world to directly contact doctors from medical institutions such as the First Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University and others in China, who have been on the frontline of the COVID-19 battle.

The partners are also making available, via free trials, three services for medical professionals and researchers. This includes Epidemic Prediction, a service that uses machine learning to model epidemic characteristics of COVID-19 in a particular region, providing estimates of size, peak time and duration of the epidemic, and spread trends under optimistic, neutral, and pessimistic conditions. Alibaba says 31 provinces in China tested the algorithm and it averaged 98% accuracy.

Additionally, it made available CT Image Analytics, a service designed to analyze CT images to help improve COVID-19 testing accuracy and detection efficiency for diagnosing the virus using deep-learning algorithms. More than 160 hospitals in China are already using the service.

Finally, Genome Sequencing for Coronavirus Diagnostic is a virus genome sequencing solution for coronavirus analytics, including viral genetic data screening, evolutionary analysis, protein structure analysis, and diagnostic reporting. It can complete the diagnosis of the new coronavirus within 14 hours, which is five times faster than other available sequencing solutions in China. And it can screen more than 20 people simultaneously.

Chipmakers are also partnering with biomedical firms and scientists to accelerate genome-sequencing analysis and vaccine development. Earlier this week Intel and Lenovo said they provided a large high-performance compute cluster with Beijing-based BGI Genomics, which is analyzing the genomic characteristics of COVID-19 to speed testing and vaccine development.

And late yesterday, Nvidia said it will provide a free 90-day license to Parabricks to any researcher worldwide that is working to fight the novel coronavirus. Parabricks is based on the Genome Analysis Toolkit, and it uses GPUs to accelerate by as much as 50 times the analysis of sequence data.

Researchers with access to NVIDIA GPUs can fill out this form to request a Parabricks license. Meanwhile, for researchers working with Oxford Nanopore long-read data, a repository of GPU-accelerated tools is available on GitHub. In addition, the following applications already have NVIDIA GPU acceleration built in: Medaka, Racon, Raven, Reticulatus, Unicycler.

Additionally, organizations including IBM and Stanford-founded project Folding@home are calling on developers, white-hat hackers, gamers, and essentially anyone else with a computer at home to donate GPUs and code for a cure.

IBM today expanded its global coding challenge to address both climate change and now COVID-19. In about a week it will release details on three COVID-19-specific starter kits — these will include an architectural diagram and a tutorial with starter code and reference materials — to help developers build open source technology that address three COVID-19 areas: crisis communication during an emergency, ways to improve remote learning, and how to inspire cooperative local communities.

“That said, you don't need to wait,” wrote Willie Tejada, GM for IBM Digital Business Group, in a blog post. “You can register and get started now creating applications with our open source-powered software built on Red Hat OpenShift, IBM Cloud, IBM Watson, IBM Blockchain, and data from The Weather Company.”