Cirrascale Powers Ai2’s $152M Push for Open, Scientific AI at National Scale

In its continued partnership with Ai2, Cirrascale has been selected as the managed services partner for one of the most ambitious open AI initiatives in the U.S.—Ai2 has received a $152 million award, jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and NVIDIA. The goal is to build a fully open, national-scale AI infrastructure that advances both the science of AI and how it can be applied for scientific discovery.

That’s a mission we’re passionate about and proud to support.

A Bold Push for Open AI at Scale

Officially called Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science (OMAI), the project is led by Dr. Noah A. Smith, a longtime leader in the open AI space and Amazon professor of machine learning at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. Several universities across the country will provide additional support, and the team will develop the open models, datasets, tools, and infrastructure needed for scientists across disciplines to use and build on.

What’s most exciting is it’s not just another research grant. It’s a significant move toward an AI future that’s more transparent, inclusive and accessible. The goal is to create real-world impact.

The National Science Foundation is investing $75 million, and NVIDIA is contributing $77 million. Cirrascale will make the initiative run smoothly by provisioning and managing the high-performance infrastructure that powers the entire ecosystem.

Turning World-Class Research Into Reality

Cirrascale’s partnership with Ai2 continues to thrive; earlier this summer, we launched our Inference Platform and collaborated with Ai2 to bring the organization’s OLMo, Molmo, and Tülu models to life in production-ready environments.

Before that, deploying these models required a significant amount of manual work—think infrastructure setup, optimization, scaling. Now, with Cirrascale, developers and teams can spin up scalable endpoints for these models (or their own fine-tuned versions) with just a few clicks.

That same underlying spirit of taking powerful open models and making them usable in the real world is what we hope to bring to the new OMAI project.

“We’ve always believed that AI should be usable, scalable and accessible to the people building real-world solutions,” said Dave Driggers, Cirrascale’s CEO and CTO. “With this collaboration with Ai2, the NSF and NVIDIA, we’re turning the corner on how open models can be deployed and adopted at a national scale, and we’re proud to help accelerate the next wave of scientific innovation.”

Built for the Community and Backed by Science

The hard truth is that most of AI still revolves around closed models and black-box systems. But if you’re building something with higher stakes, such as a healthcare tool or a climate model, successful teams need transparency, reproducibility and control.

This is what Ai2 believes in, and it’s why Cirrascale is proud to be aligned with this effort.

With Cirrascale’s powerful infrastructure and capabilities in place, Ai2 and its partners can focus on pushing the boundaries to release powerful, open, research-grade models that produce meaningful results in the field.

We’re proud to build the foundation for this kind of innovation. It’s a significant step toward a more open AI future, and it’s only getting started.

Read more about the announcement on the Ai2 Blog.