AWS spent its Washington summit this week making one thing obvious: it wants government agencies and the contractors that serve them off legacy infrastructure and onto its cloud. It's writing large checks to get them there.

Through a new Intelligence Community Accelerated Modernization Framework, the hyperscaler is offering up to $1 billion in outcome-based credits to intelligence agencies that are still running workloads on-premises. The credits are tied to migration milestones rather than to signed contracts and run through October 2030. CIA Director John Ratcliffe used his first public remarks in office to confirm the agency would use them, AWS said in the announcement.

Another move reaches further down the food chain. On Tuesday, AWS announced the general availability of Secret Cloud for Industry, which lets cleared defense contractors and research institutions run classified workloads on Secret Region infrastructure the government already uses. Northrop Grumman is the first contractor operational on the service. AWS also put up a $20 million accelerator aimed at the rest of the defense industrial base, including qualified contractors, federally funded research centers, ISVs and system integrators. 

Across both announcements and in conversations with executives at the event, AWS is signaling that its public-sector strategy runs through partners, not just direct agency relationships.

Rishi Bhaskar, worldwide public sector partnership lead at AWS, laid out the company's partner pitch as a three-part deal: build, monetize, scale. 

Partners deploy their solutions on AWS infrastructure, using the hyperscaler’s compute and expanding its global footprint. "If you're building a business as a channel partner, AWS is the best place to build your agentic business," Bhaskar told Channel Dive. 

Next, partners monetize through AWS programs, with managed services the clearest demand signal Bhaskar is seeing. As migrations move up the stack into agentic AI, the deployments get complex enough that agencies want someone to run them, and AWS has built an offering to push partners toward a managed-services competency. 

The third piece is scale, which Bhaskar tied to the breadth of the partner ecosystem and to AWS Marketplace as the mechanism for reaching end customers.

Federal migrations 

The market data gives AWS’s pitch a number. Omdia, Channel Dive's sister company, said the U.S. federal channel was worth $75.2 billion in 2025 and projected 4% growth in 2026, driven by AI, managed services and cybersecurity. The standout was managed service providers, which grew 14.1% year over year, ahead of the ecosystem average of 2.4%, as agencies turned to contractors to keep operations running after DOGE staffing cuts.

AWS also extended a program built for that cost scrutiny to government customers. Federal, state and local agencies now qualify for AWS Business Value Realization, an outcome-based partner motion AWS launched in June that gives partners benchmarks, ROI models and change-management playbooks to prove a deployment delivered. Bhaskar said proving ROI is harder in government than in commercial work — longer procurement cycles, more stakeholders, operational success metrics — so BVR gives partners a structured way to tie technology spend to mission outcomes.

For partners, AWS is providing the opening and the pressure at once. Agencies are under orders to innovate faster and adopt generative AI, but they still have to meet strict security and data-residency requirements and demonstrate a clear return to oversight bodies. The legacy relationships that have defined government IT contracting have typically focused on rewarding initial wins. What AWS is doing differently is funding rewards for partners that stay close to the agency, proving they're having an impact and scale what works.

Whether the credits change behavior is the open question. Outcome-based incentives only matter if agencies and contractors can hit the milestones that unlock them, and classified modernization can move slowly. But AWS has removed two of the standard excuses: the cost of migrating, and the wait for infrastructure that used to take months to stand up. The next move belongs to the partners.