White House unveils $6 billion science and AI package

At the White House's Science: A New Golden Age summit on October 8, the US administration announced science initiatives worth more than $6 billion. The largest piece is about $2.4 billion pledged by 11 companies to the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission, which uses AI to speed up research at national labs.

Nvidia pledged $1 billion, AMD $500 million, OpenAI $200 million, and Anthropic and Google $150 million each. AMP and Emerald AI pledged $100 million each; AWS, Armada, Crusoe and Micron $50 million each. Anthropic's share is a three-year pledge of Claude, Claude Code and API credits for hundreds of projects at NASA, NIH and NSF.

The pledges are mostly computing capacity, cloud access, model access, discounts and training delivered over years, not money handed to agencies. Separately, DOE announced $159 million for 12 new Phase II Genesis projects and eight priority areas for a $215 million quantum computing competition.

An in-kind pledge provides goods or services instead of money. Compute credits are free cloud usage up to a set amount.

AI-driven science needs vast computing power that public budgets cannot cover alone. These partnerships speed labs' access to frontier models and hardware, but also deepen reliance on a few companies, raising questions about dependence and transparency.

The Genesis Mission aims to combine the data, supercomputers and research capacity of DOE's 17 national laboratories with AI to speed up experiment design and analysis in materials, energy, fusion and biotechnology. Decades of lab data are seen as a valuable resource, and the program is framed as a priority for national security and technological competition.

Credit programs are not only for government labs. Look for startup and small business credit programs from cloud and AI providers, use them to test an automation on real data before paying, and weigh the cost of staying on a platform once free credits run out.