The Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) secured $152 million from the National Science Foundation and NVIDIA—the largest federal investment in open-source AI infrastructure to date. This public-private partnership will create the first fully open suite of multimodal AI models for scientific research, directly addressing enterprise concerns about transparency, data sovereignty, and infrastructure control that have limited large-scale AI agent deployments.

The funding signals a critical policy shift toward open AI infrastructure as enterprises struggle with black-box proprietary systems that can’t meet compliance, auditability, and reproducibility requirements for regulated industries and mission-critical applications.