NVIDIA, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) have announced a joint initiative to advance open artificial intelligence models for scientific research.
The project, known as the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI), represents a combined investment of $152 million — $75 million from NSF and $77 million from NVIDIA.
The effort is part of NSF’s Mid-Scale Research Infrastructure program and aligns with the White House’s AI Action Plan, which emphasizes open-source models as critical to U.S. global competitiveness. The initiative will develop fully open multimodal large language models trained on scientific data, enabling researchers to process literature, analyze datasets, generate code, and accelerate discoveries in fields such as materials science, biology, and energy.
Ai2 will lead the project under principal investigator Noah Smith, with academic contributions from the University of Washington, University of Hawaii at Hilo, University of New Hampshire, and University of New Mexico. Cloud services provider Cirrascale and hardware partner Supermicro will support the infrastructure buildout.
NVIDIA is supplying its HGX B300 systems with Blackwell Ultra GPUs and AI Enterprise software platform, designed to train and deploy large-scale AI models with high efficiency. According to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, “AI is the engine of modern science — and large, open models for America’s researchers will ignite the next industrial revolution.”
NSF leadership described the partnership as a “game changer” for U.S. science, while Ai2 emphasized the importance of transparency and reproducibility in AI model development. The organization’s existing OLMo and Molmo model families will serve as foundations for the new open ecosystem.
The project is expected to support both immediate breakthroughs, such as improving biomedical research and material discovery, and long-term goals, including building an AI-ready workforce and strengthening American leadership in AI-driven scientific discovery.
