Nvidia has partnered with the NSF for a $30 million, two-year commitment to support the NAIRR program aiming for AI innovation.
Nvidia, one of the most prominent artificial intelligence (AI) chip makers in the world, has revealed a new relationship with the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States of America.
This partnership will provide financial support for a new AI research program. The pilot program being run by the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) aims to increase access to the resources necessary for “responsible AI discovery and innovation”.
Nvidia has pledged to contribute thirty million dollars worth of its technologies over the next two years. In addition to offering NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing resources and NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, the developer intends to collect insights from researchers utilizing its platforms to improve the efficiency of the technology.
NAIRR has ten additional collaborators across the United States government, some of which include the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, amongst others.
The head of the National Science Foundation, Sethuraman Panchanathan, referred to the cooperation on the NAIRR pilot as an indication of the “urgency” of building such resources for the “future of artificial intelligence in the United States.”
“By investing in AI research through the NAIRR pilot, the United States unleashes discovery and impact and bolsters its global competitiveness.”
Katie Antypas, the head of the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure at the National Science Foundation, has stated that the ultimate goal of the National Advanced Research Infrastructure Research (NAIRR) will be to make computation, data, models, and software accessible to researchers and communities.
The executive order on artificial intelligence issued by the Biden administration in October 2023 aligns with the start of the NAIRR pilot, which directed the National Science Foundation to create a pilot for NAIRR within three months.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) stated that it prioritizes funding research aimed at advancing trustworthy, safe, and secure artificial intelligence.
“The NAIRR pilot will open opportunities to pursue AI research outside of well-resourced universities and private sector laboratories and will pilot support for computing and data resources for university classrooms.”
This comprises “methods for testing, evaluating, and verifying artificial intelligence improving the accuracy and reliability of model performance; and advancing the ability to assure intended model behavior.”
This comes at the same time as Nvidia stated on January 24 that it will be forming a new relationship with Equinix, a company that operates data centers, to supply the company’s corporate clients with supercomputing systems.
“Now, enterprises can own NVIDIA AI supercomputing and software, paired with the operational efficiency of Equinix management, in hundreds of data centers worldwide.”
Nvidia’s founder and current CEO, Jensen Huang, has stated that generative artificial intelligence is “transforming every industry.”
Equinix, which has its headquarters in California, is one of the most prominent companies in the world in terms of its proportion of global colocation data centers. The company has 248 data centers in 31 nations and five continents.