Genesis

Genesis Mission is a redirection of DOE resources towards developing AI technologies for science that was first established by an executive order.

Infrastructure

Genesis has branded a few supercomputer deployments so far:

• Lux, a modest (10K GPU) OCI supercomputer with MI355X GPUs that will be deployed at ORNL
• Equinox, a modest (10K GPU) supercomputer with B200 GPUs of some sort that will be deployed at Argonne
• Solstice, an OCI supercomputer with B200 GPUs of some sort that will be deployed at Argonne

Funding

The mission did not launch with additional funding.

2026 Funding

On March 17, 2026, DOE announced $293M in funding for research programs related to the Genesis mission.a¹ As with the 2025 announcement below though, it was not new investment; my understanding is that this money was taken away from other program offices’ research budgets, recolored as Genesis, and is now being re-competed back to those program offices.

This “Request for Application (RFA)” structure is unusual for a few reasons:

1. Teams can propose either “Phase 1” or “Phase 2” proposals. Phase 1 are very short term (6-9 months) and very small amounts of money (under $1M) which is only enough to demonstrate the inkling of a good idea. Phase 2 proposals are longer-term (multiple years) and bigger ($5M).
2. Proposals essentially must include an industry collaborator, and those collaborators must include “letters of commitment” which are a legally binding agreement that goes far beyond what previous research proposals requested (“letters of support” which were non-committal).
3. There is an open call for people who want to serve on the review committee. This is highly unusual and likely a reflection of the fact that everyone who’d normally be a reviewer has a conflict of interest from being a proposer, given how wide of a net this RFA was.²

It is unclear what industry collaborators stand to get out of participating in these research proposals, but the ambition of Genesis is to foster public-private partnerships, and this forces the “private” part into the process.

2025 Funding

On December 10, 2025, DOE recolored $320M in funding as being related to Genesis.³ That funding package included:⁴

Amount	Initiative
$40M	American Science Cloud
$30M	Transformational AI Model Consortium (fka Trillion Parameter Consortium?)
$79M	SciDAC
$16M	DIII-D

A bunch of the above funding predates Genesis, demonstrating that DOE appears to be coloring all of its money as Genesis funding rather than committing new resources to it.

Requests for information

Genesis has issued multiple RFIs that speak to the program’s directions:

• Transformational AI Capabilities for National Security due January 23, 2026
• Request for Information (RFI) on Mobilizing Talent for the Genesis Mission and Developing an American Workforce to Advance Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Science and Engineering due March 4, 2026

Executive Order details

From LAUNCHING THE GENESIS MISSION:

The Genesis Mission

The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets … to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

It establishes the American Science and Security Platform (comically, the ASS Platform) which is the infrastructure that will provide:

• “high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI computing environments, capable of supporting large-scale model training, simulation, and inference;”
• “secure access to appropriate datasets, including proprietary, federally curated, and open scientific datasets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources, consistent with applicable law; applicable classification, privacy, and intellectual property protections”

The Executive Order itself represents a redirection of existing investments rather than net-new investment. For example, it orders that

Directive to identify resources, not buy new ones

the Secretary shall identify Federal computing, storage, and networking resources available to support the Mission, including both DOE on-premises and cloud-based high-performance computing systems, and resources available through industry partners

Emphasis on automation and robotics

review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows

It specifically prioritizes the following domains and, implicitly, de-emphasizes all basic sciences.

Exemplar science and technology challenges of national importance

(i) advanced manufacturing; (ii) biotechnology; (iii) critical materials; (iv) nuclear fission and fusion energy; (v) quantum information science; and (vi) semiconductors and microelectronics.

There is a strong emphasis on cross-government partnership and private sector as well:

Quote

launch coordinated funding opportunities or prize competitions across participating agencies, to the extent permitted by law and subject to available appropriations, to incentivize private-sector participation in AI-driven scientific research progress toward integration across DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research partners

I also wrote about the Genesis Mission in my SC’25 recap blog.

Footnotes

1. Energy Department Announces $293 Million in Funding to Support Genesis Mission National Science and Technology Challenges | Department of Energy ↩

2. DOE Seeks Researchers to Review Genesis Mission AI Proposals ↩

3. Energy Department Advances Investments in AI for Science (energy.gov) ↩

4. Here’s What’s Inside DOE’s $320 Million Genesis Mission Investment (hpcwire.com) ↩