Cognizant Backs Bipartisan CREATE AI Act to Anchor NAIRR at NSF

Two Cognizant government affairs staffers used a Fortune op-ed this week to argue that Congress should stop letting AI legislation pile up and pass the one bill both parties actually agree on: the CREATE AI Act, which would put the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource on permanent footing at the National Science Foundation. Their opening framing is that more than 300 AI bills have been introduced this Congress alone, and NAIRR is the one worth getting across the line.

The pitch rests on a track record. A pilot version of NAIRR has operated since early 2024 and has supported more than 600 cutting-edge AI research projects across all 50 states, giving researchers, startups and nonprofits access to supercomputing they otherwise could not afford. That is the concrete thing the CREATE AI Act would preserve and expand: a shared compute resource that lets non-corporate researchers do serious AI work without waiting for a hyperscaler to underwrite them.

The politics are unusual for a piece of AI legislation. NAIRR launched under the Biden administration and was endorsed in the Trump administration's AI Action Plan, and the current Senate version is being championed by Todd Young of Indiana, Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Cory Booker of New Jersey. The House companion is led by Jay Obernolte of California and Don Beyer of Virginia. That is a genuinely bipartisan lineup, which is rare enough in AI policy that it is the main reason to pay attention.

The international framing is where the piece leans hardest. The authors point to China's state-directed National Integrated Computing Network, the United Kingdom's commitment of up to £2 billion through 2030 to fund its public AI Research Resource, and the European Union's InvestAI initiative to mobilize up to €200 billion for public-private partnerships on AI infrastructure. The implicit ask is that if the United States wants a comparable public research stack, permanent statutory grounding for NAIRR is table stakes.

The honest caveat is that the piece is signed by two Cognizant government affairs executives, so read it as advocacy from an industry stakeholder rather than neutral analysis. What the op-ed does not give you is the actual dollar appropriation attached to the bill, how NAIRR's compute would be allocated among universities, startups and agencies, or the eligibility rules that would govern access. Still, for anyone in academic AI or at a small lab, the version of the world where CREATE AI passes is the one where subsidized compute stops being a pilot and becomes something you can plan around.