NSF and NVIDIA Award Ai2 $152 Million for Fully Open National AI Ecosystem
Created on August 14|Last edited on August 14
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The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (Ai2) has secured a combined $152 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation and NVIDIA to build a fully open national AI infrastructure. The investment will support the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, led by Dr. Noah A. Smith, a senior research leader at Ai2 and professor at the University of Washington. The goal is to create a transparent, reproducible AI ecosystem designed to accelerate scientific discovery and advance the science of AI itself.
Collaborative National Effort
The initiative brings together several academic partners including the University of Washington, the University of Hawai’i at Hilo, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of New Mexico. Cloud computing partner Cirrascale will provide managed services for the infrastructure, and Supermicro will supply high performance hardware. This collaboration aims to make open AI models such as Ai2’s OLMo and Molmo fully accessible for modification, inspection, and retraining.
Advancing AI for Science and National Competitiveness
Ai2 emphasizes that most AI models today remain closed which limits transparency and scientific trust. OMAI is intended to break that pattern by releasing models along with their data, code, evaluations, and documentation. NSF officials describe the effort as both an innovation driver and a key to maintaining U.S. leadership in science and technology. NVIDIA’s contribution is expected to provide critical computing power to train and operate next generation open multimodal models.
Building on Existing Open Model Foundations
Ai2’s OLMo text models and Molmo multimodal systems are already recognized for their high performance and openness. The new funding will expand their capabilities, create new tools, and ensure that future AI resources remain accessible to the global scientific community. By supporting openness and reproducibility, the project aligns with national goals for responsible and trustworthy AI development.
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