Amazon’s cloud computing unit has recently announced that it will be offering free computing power to researchers who want to leverage its custom AI chips. Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide credits to use its cloud data centers valued at $110 million to researchers who want to tap Trainium, its chip for developing AI models, that competes with chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Alphabet’s cloud division.

Notably, AWS said researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of California, Berkeley, are taking part in the program. The company plans to make 40,000 of the first-generation Trainium chips available for the program.

“AWS’s Build on Trainium initiative enables our faculty and students large-scale access to modern accelerators, like AWS Trainium, with an open programming model. It allows us to greatly expand our research on tensor program compilation, ML parallelization, and language model serving and tuning,” said Todd C. Mowry, a professor of computer science at CMU.

Most AI developers program Nvidia’s chips using Cuda, Nvidia’s flagship software, rather than working directly with the chip itself. In contrast, AWS plans to provide documentation for the core component of its chip, known as the instruction set architecture, allowing customers to program the chip directly.