NVIDIA & NSF Supercharge U.S. Science with Cutting-Edge AI Models—Wall Street Left Counting GPUs

Silicon meets science as NVIDIA and the National Science Foundation (NSF) launch a moonshot partnership to turbocharge American research with AI.

The AI Arms Race Gets Academic

Forget crypto mining rigs—NVIDIA’s latest power move puts its chips in federally-funded labs. The collaboration aims to deploy next-gen AI models across U.S. research institutions, turning hypotheses into breakthroughs at Silicon Valley speeds.

Wall Street’s FOMO Moment

While quant funds scramble to reverse-engineer these models for trading algorithms, academics get first dibs on tools that could redefine entire fields. The partnership conspicuously avoids mentioning how many H100s got diverted from hedge funds to particle accelerators.

This isn’t just about faster simulations—it’s about who controls the infrastructure of discovery. And for once, the house always wins.

NVIDIA has joined forces with the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to develop an advanced artificial intelligence system aimed at enhancing U.S. scientific research capabilities. This collaboration supports the NSF's Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure project, known as the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI), according to NVIDIA's blog.

Advancing Scientific Research

OMAI, a project of the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2), seeks to establish a fully open AI ecosystem to drive scientific discovery. The initiative also aims to advance AI science itself. NVIDIA's contribution includes providing its cutting-edge Nvidia HGX B300 systems, designed to accelerate AI model training and inference. These systems, built with NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, offer high-bandwidth memory and interconnect technologies, enabling them to handle the world's largest models and most demanding workloads efficiently.

Brian Stone, acting NSF director, emphasized the transformative impact of AI on scientific research, stating, "These investments are not just about enabling innovation; they are about securing U.S. global leadership in science and technology."

Empowering Researchers with Open Models

The collaboration aims to make large language models (LLMs) more accessible to researchers. LLMs, which are trained on vast datasets, can analyze various data forms, including images and graphs. However, the full potential of these models can be limited when critical components such as training data and code are not openly available.

NVIDIA's partnership with NSF ensures that Ai2's OMAI initiative provides open access to models and data, along with necessary tools and training for researchers. This initiative aligns with the WHITE House AI Action Plan, which promotes America’s leadership in AI technology through open models.

Strategic Alignment with National AI Goals

The White House's "Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan," unveiled in July, supports the acceleration of AI-enabled science and technology development. The OMAI project, supported by NVIDIA, aligns with these goals by fostering the creation of leading open models to strengthen the U.S.'s global AI leadership in academia and research.

Through this collaboration, NVIDIA and NSF are making strides towards building a robust national research infrastructure, ensuring that America's researchers have the tools necessary to drive the next wave of scientific breakthroughs.

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