National Compute plans to give the Trump administration $100 million in computing credits for its Genesis mission, a government-wide effort to use artificial intelligence to speed scientific discovery. The company expects to announce the donation Thursday at an event with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. Two people familiar with the matter said the credits would give Genesis researchers access to advanced computing resources.
“We think there should be thousands more Anthropics and OpenAI's,” National Compute Cofounder Anjney Midha said. “[B]ut to unleash that kind of innovation, which is extraordinarily profitable for the public, we need to reduce the barrier to entry, increase compute access, and allow the researchers and scientists to do what they do best.”
Who Gets Computing Power
Smaller labs and companies can struggle to secure capacity for frontier research. Major providers often prioritize long-term contracts with the largest AI labs. The donation would give researchers working on the administration’s mission access to computing resources, even as smaller organizations find that access difficult to obtain.
National Compute is building what it calls the National Compute Grid, a network meant to pool capacity from multiple providers and make it available to researchers, companies and government agencies. A draft paper POLITICO reviewed compares the project to the power grid or interstate highway system, describing a shared network that connects resources now isolated from one another.
The grid would combine capacity from labs and cloud providers using Nvidia and AMD processors, along with Google's tensor processing units. Users could buy computing as needed, reserve capacity for larger projects or connect their own systems. They’d pay only for the power they use.
According to the paper, major chipmakers, cloud and infrastructure providers including Vultr and Crusoe, and universities back National Compute. Venture capitalists and institutional investors, including public investors such as universities and pension funds, finance the company. Its aim is to pool 2 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030; 750 megawatts have been allocated to date.
Government Oversight, Voluntary Disclosure
The donation fits into a broader administration effort to expand access to computing power. The Trump administration has taken what the article describes as a largely light-touch approach to AI regulation, while prioritizing a race with China to build the most advanced models. The White House declined to comment on the donation or computing network.
National Compute is also launching Grid Defense, a program that lets government agencies test AI models through Marshall, an agent embedded in the grid, before deciding whether those models are safe enough to deploy. Agencies can set their own testing procedures, Midha said. Some details won’t be made public, partly to keep frontier models from learning how to evade evaluations.
Marshall would coordinate testing and return anonymized results to researchers. The government would be able to see the results, while labs could voluntarily decide whether to release a model. Midha called the system “continuous frontier alignment monitoring at scale” and said it would “enable your public stakeholders to monitor you as they need.”
The program would likely depend on participation from AI labs and the federal government. National Compute said it created the program in response to a series of high-profile incidents involving AI agents, including attacks on companies that AI labs reported over the summer.
Grid Defense entered invite-only early access in June with some government agencies, according to the paper. Starting this week, the company plans to let public-sector users with a .gov or .mil email address, along with students and faculty with .edu addresses, request access through a scheduling system. Each public-sector user will receive $100 in National Compute credits, separate from the $100 million donation for the Genesis mission.