❯ Nvidia commits $1 billion over five years to US scientific research in quantum computing, healthcare and energy security

A pledge announced in WashingtonNvidia announced at an event in Washington on October 8 that it will commit $1 billion over the next five years to funding US scientific discovery. According to The Register, the money supports AI research and development in fields including quantum computing, healthcare and energy security, and amounts to about one-sixtieth of Nvidia’s quarterly profits.

Part of the Genesis MissionThe pledge falls under the US government’s Genesis Mission, announced late last year to use AI to drive scientific discovery. Nvidia has long aimed to fuse AI with high-performance computing and has steadily released software libraries for quantum computing, healthcare, drug discovery and physics simulation.

A return to US supercomputingThe Register says the Department of Energy’s last flagship supercomputers powered by Nvidia date back to 2018. Last year Nvidia said it would supply at least seven new supercomputers across the Argonne, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories; Argonne’s Solstice system uses 100,000 Blackwell GPUs, is built with Oracle and is aimed largely at AI workloads.

Science machines follow AI chipsRecent generations of Nvidia GPUs have prioritized the lower-precision computation common in AI, with the double-precision math that traditional scientific computing needs handled partly through emulation. National labs buying these machines are in effect adapting scientific work to the traits of AI chips. The Energy Department’s next top machine for pure double-precision performance, Discovery, will still use AMD chips and is expected online in 2029.

▮ SIGNALA billion dollars is trivial next to Nvidia’s profits; what it buys is national laboratories building their next generation of research computing on Nvidia’s platform.