Nvidia Pledges $1B to US Science, Plans Seven DOE Supercomputers

Nvidia committed $1 billion to US scientific discovery over the next five years, a figure The Register tagged as "about 1/60th of its quarterly profits." The pledge was announced Thursday at an event in Washington, DC and ties into the Trump administration's Genesis Mission, launched late last year to apply AI to research in quantum computing, healthcare and energy security.

Alongside the money, the company said it would supply "no fewer than seven new supercomputers" across the Department of Energy's Argonne, Los Alamos and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Argonne gets Solstice, a 100,000-Blackwell-GPU machine built with Oracle, aimed at AI workloads that "can get by with 16, eight or even four bits of precision." Los Alamos is lined up for Mission and Vision, both running Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips over the Quantum-X800 InfiniBand fabric.

The context: DOE's last Nvidia-powered flagships, Summit and Sierra, were commissioned "all the way back in 2018."

Not every new DOE flagship runs on Nvidia silicon. Oak Ridge's Discovery, slated to come online in 2029, is being built by HPE's Cray division around AMD's FP64-optimized MI430X GPUs and Venice CPUs, with peak theoretical performance "somewhere between 3.3 and 8.5 exaFLOPS depending on whether or not Oak Ridge gets a facility power upgrade."

The Washington pledge capped a week in which Jensen Huang collected one of six National Medals handed to tech CEOs at a Trump AI summit; our tracker has logged 199 Nvidia stories in the last 90 days.