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May 27, 2026Industry News
Amazon MGM Studios & AWS Launch the GenAI Creators' Fund

Announced at AI on the Lot at Culver Studios, the GenAI Creators' Fund is a joint Amazon MGM Studios and AWS initiative giving creators access to professional-grade AI tools and funding — grants for proofs-of-concept and shorts aimed at digital creators who built massive audiences but never had access to studio-grade production. Alongside the fund, Amazon revealed its first three greenlit animated series, all bound for Prime Video: "Cupcake & Friends" from BuzzFeed Studios, a cupcake and her friends navigating the chaos of a sleepover; "Love, Diana Music Hunters" from Albie Hecht at pocket.watch (former Nickelodeon entertainment president and a SpongeBob developer), a band of K-pop space-traveling musicians racing to Planet Goo; and "Punky Duck" from Emmy-winning "The Book of Life" and "Maya and the Three" creator Jorge R. Gutierrez, a punk duck and his cat tearing through an exaggerated Los Angeles. Powering the work is Project Nara, Amazon MGM Studios' purpose-built AI production platform on AWS — a model-agnostic, collaborative workspace that routes each task to the optimal AI model and integrates with the tools creators already use (Maya, Blender, Nuke, Unreal Engine, Adobe Suite), with provenance tracking for IP protection. The framing throughout: "human creativity leads, and AI supports." It marks the first major Hollywood studio to formally fund and greenlight generative-AI productions, alongside the AI-curious creators willing to work this way.