Seattle’s Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) is set to receive $152 million in grants through a public-private collaboration aimed at transforming the way scientific research is conducted across the country. The funding, announced by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), will back the newly launched Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project.
Designed to create advanced artificial intelligence models, the OMAI initiative seeks to speed up scientific breakthroughs by providing cutting-edge AI tools to researchers nationwide. The funding will be split between NSF, which is contributing $75 million, and technology giant Nvidia, which will provide $77 million in resources and support.
In a statement, the NSF noted that while AI development is advancing quickly, “the cost of creating and researching powerful AI models has grown beyond the budgets of university labs and federally funded researchers.” The agency emphasized that this growing gap is preventing academics from exploring a wide range of topics, even though they have historically played a central role in developing many of the foundational technologies driving today’s AI advancements.
With this investment, Ai2 will focus on building open-source, multimodal large language models trained specifically on scientific literature and datasets. These tools are intended to help researchers process and analyze studies more quickly, write code, generate data visualizations, and identify patterns linking new findings to past discoveries.
The collaboration will also extend funding to research teams at several universities, including the University of Washington, reinforcing the Pacific Northwest’s growing influence in the AI innovation space.
