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DOE awards $159M to 12 Genesis Mission Phase II projects

The Energy Department’s Oct. 8 awards span fusion, rare earths, quantum and HPC, as industry partners pledged $2.4 billion in compute credits at a White House science summit.

Motion Media News Staff

Oct 12, 2026

3 minutes

Brown metal Department of Energy sign with seal and Independence Avenue address, trees and the Forrestal Building behind it.

Photo: G. Edward Johnson, CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), via Wikimedia Commons (source)

The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday, Oct. 8, announced 12 Phase II Genesis Mission awards totaling $159 million, expanding a program President Donald Trump launched in November 2025 to apply advanced AI to scientific discovery.

The awards bring the number of Phase II projects to 14 when earlier picks under the Office of Electricity and the Office of Nuclear Energy are counted, the DOE said. Six new Phase I awards were also issued. DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil said the Phase II teams had already shown what is possible when advanced AI is paired with scientific data and computing, and that the new money would take that work further.

Who got Phase II money

Through DOE's Office of Science, the 12 projects include an AI digital twin for Commonwealth Fusion Systems' SPARC fusion device; an expanded RNA structure database at the University of California San Diego; lattice QCD work at MIT; a geothermal subsurface AI platform at UC Irvine; rare-earth separation chemistry at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; enzyme design tools at the University of Washington; extreme-environment chip design at Fermilab; a shared accelerator platform at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; quantum error-correction codesign at Harvard; scientific software AI at Argonne National Laboratory; quantum-magnet design at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and an automated assistant for the FRIB isotope separator at Northeastern University, according to the DOE release.

DatacenterDynamics reported that Oak Ridge is supplying compute for six of the newly selected projects. ORNL Director Stephen Streiffer said the selections align with lab priorities in AI, quantum, fusion, critical materials and user facilities.

Industry compute pledges

The same day, at the White House "Science: A New Golden Age" summit, the administration said 11 companies had pledged $2.4 billion in AI tools and compute credits to the Genesis Mission Consortium for more than 15 federal agencies. The White House fact sheet listed Nvidia at $1 billion, AMD at $500 million, OpenAI at $200 million, Anthropic and Google at $150 million each, AMP and Emerald AI at $100 million each, and AWS, Armada, Crusoe and Micron at $50 million each.

Crusoe said its $50 million commitment covers three years of AI compute and inference credits on Crusoe Cloud for researchers at agencies including DOE, NASA, NIH and NSF. DatacenterDynamics noted earlier Microsoft and Google credit pledges from July.

What's next

DOE said more detail on the new Phase I awards and prior selections is available on its site. The White House fact sheet also described related regional compute hubs, fellowship programs and quantum and space-nuclear initiatives announced at the same summit.