Department of Energy (DOE) and Dell Technologies leaders on Thursday cast the agency’s new Genesis Mission and the forthcoming Doudna supercomputer as central to a broader push to accelerate U.S. scientific discovery through artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC).
Speaking at the Dell Technologies Federal Symposium, DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil said the Genesis Mission aims to accelerate science through AI. The department and its 17 national laboratories are partnering with industry, academia, and other scientific institutions to develop a digital platform powered by AI.
“We are seeking to revolutionize how science and engineering are practiced in our nation,” Gil said. “I really believe that you’ll get a ‘before and after’ of how science and engineering are going to be practiced.”
Gil said DOE plans to deploy the system first across the department’s national laboratories, serving more than 40,000 scientists, engineers, and technical staff, before expanding access to federal agencies and universities.
The United States spends roughly $1 trillion annually on research and development, yet Gil said the Genesis Mission could dramatically amplify the impact of that investment.
“We believe that it is possible to double the productivity and impact of that trillion dollars a year within a decade,” he said.
As part of that work, DOE has launched 26 science and technology challenges under the Genesis Mission spanning the electric grid, fusion energy, nuclear energy, health care, and discovery science.
“The idea is to motivate the best teams in the country to propose solutions to some of the most ambitious challenges that we face,” Gil said.
Gil also argued that more computing capacity will be necessary to achieve those goals.
“We don’t have enough AI compute in the federal government and in the university ecosystem,” Gil said.
Industry partners are playing a key role in building that capacity. Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell highlighted the company’s collaboration with DOE and NVIDIA to develop the Doudna supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a DOE user facility at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Dell said the effort reflects a close co-engineering partnership between government and industry.
“I think that this is a super important effort … and it will serve as a blueprint for federal AI and HPC systems,” Dell said. “Our teams are super passionate about making the project an incredible success.”
Gil said the Doudna supercomputer is slated to become operational in mid-2027, enabling larger-scale AI and simulation workloads across the national research community. According to NERSC, Doudna will provide more than 10 times the performance of the facility’s current flagship system.
“These capabilities that we’re building together, it’s going to be transformative,” Gil said. “We’ve got to continue to be building and adding more and more capabilities. It’s going to make a huge difference, the Doudna.”
Speaking to reporters after the keynote session, Dell Technologies Chief Technology Officer and Chief AI Officer John Roese said the joint appearance by Gil and Dell underscored how government and industry are tackling the same infrastructure challenge.
“The government and industry are solving the same problem, but we just need to realize we’re solving the same problem,” Roese said. “Our goal is to have this extremely fast-moving innovation pipeline, which is really a supply chain … at the national level.”
“It was not a mistake that Genesis is a very public-private partnership,” Roese continued. “There’s a lot of private industry at the table, because candidly, the only way this happens is we have to basically do what we do in private industry even faster, but we have to do it at a national level.”
Roese said Dell Technologies is “super excited about Genesis,” adding that while it will be a lot of work, “We know how to do it. We’ve just got to do it.”