Amazon is opening the doors again to climate-tech startups that want to help shrink the footprint of Echo speakers, Fire TV sticks, Kindles, Ring doorbells, and the rest of its gadgets—this time with a sharper focus on the guts of the hardware itself. Applications are now live for the 2026 Amazon Devices Climate Tech Accelerator, a program that sits somewhere between a startup accelerator, a hardware validation lab, and a fast track into one of the world’s biggest consumer electronics portfolios.

Launched in 2025, the Devices Climate Tech Accelerator is Amazon’s answer to a practical problem: you can make bold climate pledges at the corporate level, but if the underlying chips, circuit boards, batteries, and plastics in your devices remain carbon-heavy, those promises are hard to keep. Amazon has already committed to reaching net‑zero carbon across its business by 2040 under The Climate Pledge and has been rolling out everything from renewable energy projects to electric delivery vans to get there. The accelerator is the piece aimed squarely at the physical products in customers’ homes—trying to ensure that each generation of devices is more carbon‑efficient than the last, from the materials they’re made of to the electricity they use and what happens when they reach the end of life.

What makes this accelerator a bit different is that it is not pitched as a classic “startup bootcamp” or seed‑stage program. Amazon explicitly welcomes companies “at any stage,” including those that may already be publicly traded, shipping millions of units, but still need a way into enterprise-scale deployments. The idea is to compress what would normally be years of scattered meetings, pilots, and procurement cycles into a tightly structured, 16‑week‑style journey that ends with a clear answer: can Amazon integrate this technology into its devices, and if so, where and how? One 2025 participant from Amprius, an advanced battery company, described it as condensing three to four years of enterprise pitching into six months of focused engagement with Amazon’s technical and leadership teams.

For 2026, Amazon has drawn a very specific target map of where it wants innovation: displays, printed circuit boards and assemblies, low‑carbon materials, semiconductors, device batteries, energy efficiency, artificial intelligence, circularity, and manufacturing processes. That list is basically a blueprint of the hidden carbon budget of a modern gadget; it’s the stuff most consumers never see, but that collectively drives a huge share of emissions during manufacturing and use. If your technology can cut the energy that a display draws, replace a traditional plastic housing with a carbon‑negative alternative, or make circuit boards easier to disassemble and recycle, you’re in the zone Amazon is trying to hit.

The structure of the 2026 program reflects that hardware‑first focus. Things kick off in May 2026 with a bootcamp at Amazon’s offices in Hong Kong, where selected companies will demo their tech, sit down with Amazon engineers, and begin sketching out real integration paths—not just slideware roadmaps. From there, cohort members will build what Amazon calls “Integration Assessment” documents, which go beyond the typical pitch deck to detail technical performance, cost and benefit trade‑offs, manufacturability, and commercial viability. The program wraps up later in the year with finalists pitching to Amazon Devices & Services leadership in the U.S., where decisions about next‑step pilots and deeper product development evaluations are made.

In a nod to how much cloud and data infrastructure go into bringing any modern hardware product to market, Amazon is also throwing in up to $100,000 in AWS Activate credits for eligible participants. That’s meant to help teams run simulations, manage supply chains, deploy AI models, or build out digital twins without burning scarce startup cash on servers. On top of that, there is structured mentorship: bi‑weekly progress reviews, weekly cohort office hours, and workshops that dig into Amazon‑specific technical and decision‑making processes, co‑run with Plug and Play’s engineering and sustainability specialists.

Plug and Play, the Silicon Valley innovation platform that has worked with tens of thousands of startups and hundreds of large corporations, is Amazon’s key partner for the 2026 cohort. The organization has been building sustainability‑focused programs globally, and in this case, it helps scout and support climate tech companies that could realistically integrate with Amazon’s hardware roadmap. Plug and Play’s team emphasizes that this isn’t just about feel‑good pilots; they talk about senior leadership engagement, accelerated integration pathways, and “measurable carbon‑reduction outcomes” as core design principles for the program.

If you want a sense of the kind of companies Amazon is serious about, look at the 2025 cohort and who has moved into deeper product development evaluation. Three names stand out: Aircarbon, GRST, and Heartland. Aircarbon captures methane emissions and turns them into a carbon‑negative material that behaves like plastic, aiming to displace traditional petroleum‑based plastics in device housings, accessories, and packaging. GRST has developed a water‑soluble binder that can replace PFAS chemicals in lithium‑ion batteries, enabling water‑based manufacturing that is less toxic and easier to recycle. Heartland works on carbon‑negative natural fiber materials that can replace conventional plastics and rubber, producing parts that are lighter, potentially stronger, and lower in embodied carbon.

For those companies, getting into the accelerator isn’t just a marketing badge; it opens doors into Amazon’s internal engineering and procurement conversations. Heartland, for example, has framed its participation as a chance to prove that natural fiber composites can meet the scale, durability, and cost demands of mass‑market consumer electronics, not just niche eco‑products. The company talks about the opportunity to decarbonize plastic hardware—think device shells, internal brackets, and other plastic components—at a scale that would be hard to reach without a partner like Amazon. Aircarbon’s leadership has highlighted how unusually open Amazon has been in sharing internal tools and decision frameworks with the cohort, which helps startups align with how Amazon actually evaluates new materials and technologies.

Zooming out, the Devices Climate Tech Accelerator sits inside a broader ecosystem of Amazon sustainability initiatives that stretch from logistics to data centers. On the devices side specifically, Amazon says it measures emissions across the full lifecycle of each product—production, transport, customer use, and disposal—and has set an ambition for every new generation of devices to improve on the last in terms of carbon efficiency. It has invested in renewable energy projects designed to match the electricity used by connected devices like Echo and Fire TV, with targets to cover the use of all such devices with new clean energy capacity. A lot of that work is invisible to customers, but programs like this accelerator are where the upstream technology shifts happen that later show up as quieter product claims like “reduced carbon footprint” or “made with low‑carbon materials.”

Amazon is also increasingly sharing its internal decarbonization playbooks more broadly, through efforts like the Amazon Sustainability Accelerator in Europe and its Sustainability Exchange, which offers free tools and guidance to suppliers and other companies looking to cut emissions. The Devices Climate Tech Accelerator is a more focused, hardware‑centric cousin to those efforts, designed not just to advise companies but to actively test and, where possible, adopt their technologies. If it works as intended, the impact goes beyond Amazon: once a material, process, or design proves itself in devices that ship in the tens of millions, it becomes a lot easier for other electronics brands to justify following suit.

For founders considering applying, the bar is clearly high, but the pitch is straightforward. If you are working on displays that sip rather than gulp power, on circuit boards that can be easily separated and recycled, on next‑generation semiconductors or batteries that dramatically cut energy use or production emissions, or on materials that turn waste streams and captured carbon into device‑grade components, you are exactly who Amazon wants to hear from. You also need to be ready for real scrutiny: the program’s product development evaluation phase involves rigorous testing for performance, safety, and scalability, not just environmental impact.

Applications for the 2026 Amazon Devices Climate Tech Accelerator are open until February 24 at 10 am ET, and Amazon is directing interested companies to apply via its sustainability site. For a young climate‑tech company, getting in doesn’t guarantee a deal—but it does offer a rare shortcut into the engine room of one of the world’s biggest device makers at the exact moment that decarbonizing hardware is becoming a business priority rather than a side project.