Trump admin to receive $100 million in compute credits for AI science initiative

Por Sophia Cai and Katie Roof — POLITICO – TOP Stories

National Compute, a new company that has pooled computing power from major tech companies, plans to donate $100 million worth of computing credits to the Trump administration to be used to advance scientific discovery.

The credits are expected to be announced Thursday at an event with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. They will support the administration’s Genesis mission, a government-wide push to use AI to accelerate scientific discovery, according to two people familiar with the matter who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

The donation would give Genesis Mission researchers access to advanced computing resources at a time when smaller labs and companies can struggle to secure capacity for frontier research. Major providers often prioritise long-term contracts with the largest AI labs.

National Compute is building what it calls the National Compute Grid, a network intended to pool computing capacity from multiple providers and make it available to researchers, companies and government agencies. A draft paper explaining the project, reviewed by POLITICO, compares the grid to the power grid or interstate highway system, and describes it as a shared network connecting resources that are currently isolated.

The White House declined to comment on the donation and the computing network.

The grid is intended to bring together computing capacity from sources including labs and cloud providers that deploy Nvidia and AMD processors and Google’s tensor processing units, according to the paper. Users could buy compute as needed, reserve capacity for larger projects or connect their own computing systems, and crucially would only pay for the power they use.

National Compute is backed by major chipmakers, cloud and infrastructure providers including Vultr and Crusoe, and universities, according to the paper. The company is financed by venture capitalists and institutional investors, including public investors like universities and pension funds. It aims to pool 2 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030, with 750 megawatts allocated to date.

The initiative comes as the Trump administration looks for ways to expand access to computing power as part of a largely light-touch approach to AI regulation that has prioritized winning a race with China to build the most advanced models. The Trump administration has also described its research push as a “golden age of science,” which will be celebrated at the Thursday event.

“We think there should be thousands more Anthropics and OpenAI’s,” National Compute Cofounder Anjney Midha said. “[B]ut to unleash that kind of innovation, which is extraordinarily profitable for the public, we need to reduce the barrier to entry, increase compute access, and allow the researchers and scientists to do what they do best.”

Testing AI models

National Compute is also launching a “Grid Defense” program that enables government agencies to test AI models through Marshall, an agent embedded in the grid, before deciding whether the models are safe enough to deploy.

Agencies are empowered to set their own testing procedures, according to Midha, and those details are designed to remain confidential in part to keep frontier models from learning how to evade the evaluations. The agent would coordinate testing and return anonymized results to researchers. The government would be able to see the results, while labs can then decide voluntarily whether to release a model.

“This is continuous frontier alignment monitoring at scale,” Midha said. The approach would “enable your public stakeholders to monitor you as they need,” he said.

Such a program would likely rely on obtaining buy-in from both AI labs and the federal government, and the National Compute said the effort was created in response to a series of high-profile incidents involving AI agents, including attacks on companies reported by AI labs over the summer.

The Grid Defense program entered invite-only early access in June with some government agencies, according to the paper. Starting this week, the company plans to let public sector users with a .gov or .mil email along with students and faculty with.edu addresses, request access through a scheduling system.

Each public sector user will have access to $100 in compute credits from National Compute, which is in addition to the $100 million donation for the Genesis Mission.

Fonte: POLITICO – TOP Stories