Ai2 secures $152M from NSF and NVIDIA for open scientific AI research

Ai2, a Seattle-based nonprofit AI research institute, has secured $152 million in combined funding from the National Science Foundation ($75 million) and NVIDIA ($77 million) to build a national-level open AI ecosystem for scientific research. The partnership will establish the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project, positioning Ai2 to advance both AI-driven scientific discovery and the fundamental science of AI itself through fully transparent, reproducible models.

What you should know: The OMAI project represents a major federal investment in open-source AI infrastructure specifically designed for scientific applications.

• Led by Dr. Noah A. Smith, Senior Director of NLP Research at Ai2 and Amazon Professor at the University of Washington, the project involves multiple academic institutions including the University of Washington, University of Hawai’i at Hilo, University of New Hampshire, and University of New Mexico.
• Cirrascale Cloud Services will provide managed cloud computing services, while Supermicro will supply hardware platforms to support the new infrastructure.
• The funding builds on Ai2’s existing open AI models, including OLMo (open text models) and Molmo (multimodal language models that can process both text and images).

Why this matters: The partnership addresses a critical gap in AI development where many leading models remain closed-source and unverifiable for high-stakes scientific applications.

• Unlike proprietary AI systems, Ai2’s models are released with complete transparency, including data, code, evaluations, and documentation needed for analysis, modification, and retraining from scratch.
• The initiative aims to ensure American leadership in AI while providing the scientific community with trustworthy, inspectable AI tools for breakthrough research.

What they’re saying: Project leaders emphasize the importance of transparency in scientific AI development.

• “This award marks a significant moment for truly open, scientific AI,” said Smith. “At Ai2, with our academic collaborators, we’re building an ecosystem where world-class models like OLMo and Molmo are powerful tools to augment the work of experts, but are also fully transparent, reproducible, and most importantly, available to all.”
• “Bringing AI into scientific research has been a game changer,” said Brian Stone, performing the duties of the NSF director. “NSF is proud to partner with NVIDIA to equip America’s scientists with the tools to accelerate breakthroughs.”

The big picture: This funding represents a strategic government investment in open-source AI infrastructure as competition intensifies with closed commercial models from major tech companies.

• The partnership leverages both federal research funding and private sector expertise to create AI tools specifically designed for scientific applications rather than commercial products.
• By emphasizing full transparency and reproducibility, the project addresses growing concerns about the reliability and trustworthiness of AI systems in critical research applications.