Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering students and adult learners in Singapore 1,000 free credits to use its Kiro AI developer tool to get the country’s workforce ready for the new technology.
The pilot programme, announced last week, is open to those aged 18 and above across Singapore’s polytechnics, Institute of Technical Education (ITE) colleges, and universities. The allocation is a 20-fold increase from the 50-credit free tier currently available to individual users.
AWS is also launching AWSome Lab in July 2026, a Web-based portal aimed at connecting Singapore small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and enterprises with AI solutions developed by students. The goal is to allow real business challenges to be integrated into the curriculum, and provide learners with opportunities to apply AI development skills in practical settings.
Kiro is AWS’s agentic development environment which enables individuals to build applications based on their ideas, and has been available since November 2025. In an education environment, this can help a business student streamline a workflow, a healthcare student improve patient intake, or a lecturer recreate a lesson plan.
While most AI coding tools start with a prompt to generate code, Kiro starts with a spec, where a user would define scope, scenarios, and success criteria in natural language. This means that the production-ready application has built-in documentation and automated tests.
“The difference between a student who can prompt AI and a student who can build with it professionally comes down to one question: Can someone else pick up what they made and keep going?” said Elsie Tan, AWS’ country manager for worldwide public sector in Singapore.
Eligible learners with a valid e-mail address can receive complimentary access to 1,000 Kiro credits through their institutes of higher learning (IHL). The credits are sufficient to complete multiple exercises, hackathon submissions, or to build a minimum viable product from initial to final testing.
In Singapore, Republic Polytechnic was the first IHL to add Kiro to its curriculum, in a three-year agreement signed in 2025.
AWS Singapore has also launched a free AWS Academy Kiro Workshop for educators, marking the first such initiative in the AWS Asean region. The nine-module, hands-on workshop teaches AI-native software development from requirements to deployment, covering vibe coding, spec-driven development and agentic AI workflows.
Available in 11 languages, it promises ready-made curriculum, lab access and free-tier Kiro access for students, helping remove cost and setup barriers.
