The U.S. National Science Foundation announced a partnership with NVIDIA to develop a set of artificial intelligence models that will transform the ability of America's scientists to leverage AI, advancing scientific discovery and ensuring U.S. leadership in AI-powered research and innovation. NSF will contribute $75 million, with NVIDIA (link is external) providing an additional $77 million, to support the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, led by the Allen Institute for AI (link is external) (Ai2). The collaboration will create a fully open suite of advanced AI models specifically designed to support the U.S. scientific community.
This public-private investment advances priorities set forth in the White House AI Action Plan to accelerate AI-enabled science and ensure the United States is producing the leading open models that enhance America's global AI dominance.
"Bringing AI into scientific research has been a game changer," said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. "NSF is proud to partner with NVIDIA to equip America's scientists with the tools to accelerate breakthroughs. These investments are not just about enabling innovation; they are about securing U.S. global leadership in science and technology and tackling challenges once thought impossible."
The development of AI technologies is advancing rapidly, but the cost of creating and researching powerful AI models has grown beyond the budgets of university labs and federally funded researchers. This growing divide limits the topics that academic researchers can explore, despite their historic role in pioneering many of the foundational breakthroughs that power today's AI models.
With this support, Ai2 will create open-source, multimodal large language models trained on scientific data and literature. These tools will enable America's researchers and developers to process and analyze research faster, generate code and visualizations, and connect new insights to past discoveries, accelerating breakthroughs across materials science, biology, energy and more.
"As called for in the AI Action Plan, the Trump administration is committed to ensuring America fosters the leading open-source and open-weight models that set the global standard for business and academic research worldwide," said Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy." This partnership between NSF and NVIDIA puts the Action Plan to work and demonstrates the power of the American innovation ecosystem. We look forward to the novel research and scientific breakthroughs to come through open-source model development and AI-enabled science."
NSF's support is provided through its Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program, which funds high-impact, high-reward, community-driven infrastructure that fills the gap between individual research grants and large-scale national facilities. The project will also build a national AI-ready workforce, supporting training efforts that expand participation and expertise beyond traditional tech hubs, strengthening American competitiveness in AI and other critical technologies.
"AI is the engine of modern science - and large, open models for America's researchers will ignite the next industrial revolution," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. "In collaboration with NSF and Ai2, we're accelerating innovation with state-of-the-art infrastructure that empowers U.S. scientists to generate limitless intelligence, making it America's most powerful and renewable resource."
Initial applications of Ai2's work will include AI breakthroughs to accelerate the discovery of new materials, improve protein function prediction for biomedical advancements and address core weaknesses in today's large language models.
The project will provide a path forward to a future paradigm of AI-accelerated scientific discovery, supporting reliable and rigorous science and building an innovation ecosystem that benefits every American.
"Fully-open AI is not just a preference - it's a necessity," said Ali Farhadi, CEO of Ai2. "For the U.S. to continue leading the next era of scientific and technological discovery, we must create open, collaborative ecosystems where millions of researchers and developers can work together to improve and expand these systems. This infusion will supercharge the work we do at Ai2 and increase America's ability to deliver breakthrough AI developments."
NSF and NVIDIA contributions will also support research teams from the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii at Hilo, the University of New Hampshire and the University of New Mexico.
Get more information about the NSF Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program.
