The National Science Foundation (NSF) is partnering with tech giant NVIDIA to invest a total of $152 million into artificial intelligence models that will accelerate innovation and scientific discovery while supporting priorities under the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan.
NSF has committed to contributing $75 million and NVIDIA said it will invest $77 million in the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project which will create an open suite of advanced AI models to support the nation’s scientific community.
“Bringing AI into scientific research has been a game changer,” said Brian Stone, who is performing duties of the NSF director, in a statement. “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 project will be led by the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), a non-profit research organization, that will create open-source, multimodal large language models trained on scientific data and literature. Tools created by the institute aim to streamline researchers and developers’ research, generate code and visualizations, and link new insights to previous discoveries.
AI systems will help to accelerate “breakthroughs across materials science, biology, energy and more,” NSF said in announcing its investment.
The tools will first be applied to the discovery of new materials, improving protein function prediction, and addressing “core weaknesses” in current LLMs.
“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.”
NSF and NVIDIA’s announcement also aligns with priorities under the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, released last month, which lays out a blueprint for fast-tracking AI development in the United States.
“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,” Kratsios said.