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There are a lot of exciting happenings in the technology sector this year. Artificial intelligence (AI) has reached a point where companies of all sizes can benefit from it, robotics are becoming more autonomous and quantum computing is being used to solve even more complex real-world problems. Not to be left out of the conversation, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is also taking new steps in this space.
Last month’s announcement was a particularly big step: DOE announced that it enlisted NVIDIA and Oracle to build the world’s largest supercomputer for scientific discovery. The “Solstice” supercomputer will feature 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs to accelerate the DOE’s mission of driving technological leadership across U.S. security, science and energy applications.
According to the DOE, another system called “Equinox” will feature 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Construction at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will immediately begin for the Equinox system, which is slated for completion next year. The DOE says these AI systems will connect to its own network of scientific instruments and data assets to “address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges in energy, security and discovery science.”
Commonsense Approach to Computing Partnerships
As part of the partnership, Oracle will provide DOE with access to AI computing resources that use a combination of NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell architecture. Scientists from Argonne and across the country will be able to access the new AI capabilities to drive technological leadership for science and energy applications.
“Winning the AI race requires new and creative partnerships that will bring together the brightest minds and industries that American technology and science have to offer,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, in the DOE announcement. “The two Argonne systems and the collaboration between the [DOE], NVIDIA and Oracle represent a new commonsense approach to computing partnerships.”
Driving Innovation
According to NVIDIA, the Solstice and Equinox supercomputers will be located at Argonne National Laboratory. Scientists and researchers will use them to develop and train new frontier models and AI reasoning models for open science. The systems will use the NVIDIA Megatron-Core library and NVIDIA TensorRT inference software stack (for scaling). “These models will form the backbone of agentic AI workflows for scientific discovery,” NVIDIA adds.
Both AI supercomputers will support NVIDIA, Argonne and the DOE’s research collaborations to develop agentic scientists, boost R&D productivity and accelerate discovery. Solstice will be built with the DOE’s new public-private partnership model, including industry investments and use cases. The three phases of the partnership—including immediate access to Oracle-provided AI resources plus the delivery of Equinox and Solstice at Argonne—are expected to “dramatically decrease” the time it takes researchers to move from idea to discovery.
“AI is the most powerful technology of our time, and science is its greatest frontier,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with Oracle, we’re building the [DOE’s] largest supercomputer that will serve as America’s engine for discovery, giving researchers access to the most advanced AI infrastructure to drive progress across fields ranging from healthcare research to materials science.”
NVIDIA also says that the AI supercomputers will serve as the foundation for a larger-scale collaboration across science, energy and national security to deploy next-generation infrastructure and further secure U.S. leadership in artificial intelligence.
But Wait—There’s More!
In other tech-related news, the DOE extended up to $625 million in funding to establish five quantum information science centers to promote research in that area. The agency says it’s “aligning its quantum research enterprise with national priorities,” and focusing resources on advancing critical R&D across the American Quantum Information Science (QIS) research centers, strengthening the quantum innovation ecosystem and “accelerating discoveries that power next-generation technologies.”
Established in 2020 and led by a DOE national laboratory, the five DOE QIS research centers develop cutting-edge research and technologies for science’s most complex problems. The total $625 million in funding goes to awards lasting up to five years in duration, with $125 million in Fiscal Year 2025 dollars and outyear funding contingent on congressional appropriations.
