DOE recruits cloud, chip, and AI giants for Trump's Genesis Mission

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has a Christmas gift for the AI industry in the shape of agreements for collaboration in the Trump administration's Genesis Mission, which aims to use AI to drive scientific discoveries. On Thursday, the DOE said it had signed agreements with 24 organizations interested in working to advance the Genesis project. The list includes the usual AI ecosystem suspects, with developers such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI; major cloud operators AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle; server makers Dell and HPE; chip suppliers AMD, Intel, and Nvidia; plus everyone's favorite Bond villain organization, Palantir. However, the agreements are not contracts to provide services as such, but are described by the DOE as Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) with organizations that have either expressed interest in response to a Request for Information (RFI), or which already have active projects with DOE and its National Laboratories for activities related to the Genesis Mission. "These agreements help advance President Trump's Executive Order to build the national AI platform for scientific discovery and uplift the entire US R&D ecosystem," said Genesis Mission director and DOE Under Secretary for Science Dr Darío Gil. The Genesis project was kick-started just last month via an executive order issued by President Trump. It aims to create an integrated Science and Security Platform for the US by pulling together supercomputers and other resources across the DOE's 17 National Laboratories and supplementing this with input from industry and academia. Earlier this month, the agency announced $320 million in funding for four initiatives as part of the project, including the American Science Cloud (AmSC) as the infrastructure platform for Genesis, the Transformational AI Models Consortium (ModCon) to work on model development, and various projects to curate existing datasets and develop AI models validated for scientific applications. So-called neocloud firm CoreWeave is also among the signatories with the DOE, and the rent-a-GPU biz said that it plans to make its purpose-built AI cloud platform available to support advanced scientific workloads. Datacenters feel the Bern as Senator Sanders pushes bit barn building pause Trump gives state AI regulation the presidential middle finger Trump's AI 'Genesis Mission' emerges from Land of Confusion Trump wants to turn it on again with 'Genesis Mission' for AI in science CoreWeave chief exec Michael Intrator said Genesis "represents a vital national commitment to accelerating scientific discovery and reaffirming America's leadership in research and innovation." Consultants McKinsey & Company recently opined that neoclouds such as CoreWeave needed to adapt their business model to offering services built on their AI infrastructure rather than just renting GPU time, and Genesis may prove just such an opportunity. Google's DeepMind subsidiary is set to make available its frontier AI for Science models and agentic tools to scientists at the DOE National Laboratories, starting with AI co-scientist on Google Cloud, it declared. This it described as a "multi-agent virtual scientific collaborator built on Gemini," which has been trained using Google's cloud-based TPU AI chips. OpenAI said that the agreement builds on its existing work with DOE's National Laboratories, and creates a path for the parties to discuss and develop potential follow-on agreements as specific projects take shape. "We're excited to collaborate with the Department of Energy and contribute to the Genesis Mission. When frontier AI meets the expertise of the national labs, it opens up new ways to explore ideas, test them faster, and accelerate scientific progress," said Kevin Weil, OpenAI VP for Science. ®