Overview

• The initiative combines $75 million from the U.S. National Science Foundation and $77 million in NVIDIA hardware and software support to fund the five-year Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI) project.
• Dr. Noah A. Smith will lead the effort as principal investigator, with co-PIs from the University of Washington, University of Hawai‘i at Hilo, University of New Hampshire and University of New Mexico.
• NVIDIA will deploy HDX B3-100 systems built on its Blackwell Ultra architecture and AI Enterprise software, while Cirrascale Cloud Services and Supermicro will provide managed services and platforms.
• OMAI will develop and openly release full model weights, training data, code and evaluation tools to promote reproducibility across domains such as materials science, biology and energy.
• Resources, datasets and tools will roll out in phases, with Ai2 projecting the first major open multimodal AI model to arrive roughly 18 months into the program.