NSF, NVIDIA partner to support development of open AI models for science

NVIDIA and the National Science Foundation are joining forces to support the development of several open AI models designed for use in science. 

In an announcement Thursday, NSF said it would contribute $75 million and the chip manufacturer would put up $77 million to support a project to create such models that’s being led by the Allen Institute for AI, or Ai2 — a Seattle-based research nonprofit founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. 

That project, called Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science, will “create a fully open suite of advanced AI models specifically designed to support the U.S. scientific community,” per the announcement. 

The investment is in line with a desire by the Trump administration to advance partnerships with the private sector and support open-source and open-weight models. President Donald Trump’s AI Action Plan, released in July, included recommendations to prioritize both, and the administration hailed the Thursday announcement as a step to advance that plan.

“This partnership between NSF and NVIDIA puts the Action Plan to work and demonstrates the power of the American innovation ecosystem,” White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios said in a statement included in the release. “We look forward to the novel research and scientific breakthroughs to come through open-source model development and AI-enabled science.” 

According to the announcement, the funds will support Ai2’s work to create open-source, multimodal large language models — which means the model would have source code made publicly available and would be able to understand a variety of data, such as text and images. Those models would be trained on science data and literature, per the announcement.

“Fully-open AI is not just a preference — it’s a necessity,” Ali Farhadi, CEO of Ai2, said in a statement included in the release. “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.”

According to NSF’s announcement, its support for the project is provided under the agency’s Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program.

The funding announcement comes amid changes to how the science research agency distributes funding. Earlier this year, the agency canceled hundreds of existing grants that didn’t align with the administration’s priorities, such as work related to diversity, equity and inclusion; environmental justice; and misinformation and disinformation.

But funding for AI research and infrastructure has been a priority in recent announcements. Support for the Ai2 project follows the agency’s recent investments in AI testbeds and a partnership with Capital One and Intel to support five National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes and a central community hub.