The White House plans to announce more than $1 billion in industry commitments to the Genesis Mission at Thursday’s “Science: A New Golden Age Summit,” putting private technology companies at the center of a federal effort to accelerate scientific discovery. President Trump will attend the Oct. 8 summit, which is also expected to feature a new computing hub across 10 southeastern states and a $1 billion investment in Georgia for student and faculty access to computing.
The initiative ties national research priorities to computing capacity pooled by private companies. It also raises concrete questions about how government agencies will oversee AI systems and how researchers will access infrastructure built and operated with industry participation.
Federal research, private capacity
AMD, OpenAI, Anthropic and other companies are expected to make commitments to the Genesis Mission, a government-wide effort to use AI to speed scientific discovery. In July, the White House said the mission would expand to more than 15 federal agencies. The National Science Foundation and the Energy Department will invest more than $100 million in AI-driven science tools.
National Compute, a new company that has pooled computing power from major technology companies, plans to donate $100 million in computing credits to the Trump administration. The credits are expected to be announced Thursday at an event with White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios. Two people familiar with the plans described them to POLITICO; they received anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the matter. The White House declined to comment on the donation and computing network.
National Compute is building the National Compute Grid, a shared network designed to make computing capacity available to researchers, companies and government agencies. A draft paper POLITICO reviewed compared the proposed system to the power grid or interstate highway system, linking computing resources that are currently isolated. It would combine capacity from labs and cloud providers using Nvidia and AMD processors and Google's tensor processing units.
Users could buy computing as needed, reserve capacity for larger projects or connect their own systems, paying only for the power they use. The company aims to pool 2 gigawatts of computing capacity by 2030 and has allocated 750 megawatts to date. Major chipmakers, cloud and infrastructure providers such as Vultr and Crusoe, and universities back the company. Venture capitalists and institutional investors, including public investors such as universities and pension funds, finance it.
Testing and oversight
National Compute is also launching Grid Defense, which lets government agencies test AI models through Marshall, an agent embedded in the grid, before deciding whether the models are safe enough to deploy. National Compute co-founder Anjney Midha said agencies can set their own testing procedures. Some details are intended to stay confidential to prevent frontier models from learning to evade evaluations.
Marshall would coordinate testing and return anonymized results to researchers. The government could see the results, while labs could voluntarily decide whether to release a model. “This is continuous frontier alignment monitoring at scale,” Midha said. The approach would “enable your public stakeholders to monitor you as they need,” he said.
Grid Defense entered invite-only early access in June with some government agencies. Starting this week, public-sector users with .gov or .mil email addresses and students and faculty with .edu addresses can request access through a scheduling system. Each public-sector user will receive $100 in National Compute credits, on top of the planned Genesis Mission donation.
The political contest
The summit drew inspiration from a July report by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, which highlighted industry's growing role in research and development and new ways to fund and organize research. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and other scientists and technology leaders are expected to attend.
The Guardrails Alliance, a new super PAC targeting the AI industry, plans to spend $1.2 million to block AI-backed candidates in the midterm elections. It says it will target Republicans and Democrats who don't meet its demands, including “independent, transparent government oversight with real enforcement power.” The group also says AI models shouldn't make final decisions on health care or benefits denials, worker discipline or firing, or weapons deployment.
The competing proposals put federal agencies, technology companies and political groups in a fight over who sets the conditions for AI’s use. The summit’s central mechanism is a federal mission backed by private investment and privately pooled computing capacity; the government’s role includes funding, access and the ability to view Grid Defense results.