Energy Department Announces $293 Million for Genesis Mission Research

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has unveiled a major new investment to advance the Genesis Mission, an ambitious initiative designed to reshape how the nation approaches its most complex science and technology challenges. Rather than a single program or research effort, the Genesis Mission represents a new model for AI-enabled scientific problemsolving and collaboration.  

“The Genesis Mission has caught the imagination of our scientific and engineering communities to tackle national challenges in the age of AI,” said Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil, who also serves as Genesis Mission Director. “With these investments we seek breakthrough ideas and novel collaborations leveraging the scientific prowess of our National Laboratories, the private sector, universities, and science philanthropies.” 

At its core, the Genesis Mission seeks to leverage recent advances in AI—particularly largescale, domainspecific scientific models—to accelerate discovery and engineering progress. The initiative reflects DOE’s belief that the next decade of U.S. scientific leadership will depend on AIdriven research frameworks capable of integrating massive datasets, modeling complex systems, and rapidly iterating through possible solutions to longstanding challenges. 

These challenges span more than 20 priority areas essential to the nation’s economic competitiveness and security, including: 

• Advanced manufacturing and materials science 

• Biotechnology and bioenergy systems 

• Critical minerals supply chains 

• Nuclear energy technologies 

• Quantum information science and nextgeneration computing 

By encouraging interdisciplinary teams to rethink how these problems are approached, the Genesis Mission aims to create new scientific workflows that pair AI tools with human expertise to unlock discoveries that traditional methods struggle to reach. This crosssector collaboration model is designed to accelerate ideageneration, shorten the path from research to deployment, and empower engineers and scientists with tools capable of handling the complexity of modern challenges. 

A key ambition of the Genesis Mission is the creation of shared AI models, frameworks, datasets, and research platforms that can be used across disciplines and institutions. Rather than siloed efforts, DOE envisions a national ecosystem where AIenhanced tools are interoperable, trusted, and optimized for scientific and engineering applications. 

This approach is expected to: 

• Improve the speed and fidelity of simulations and predictive modeling 

• Enhance realtime decisionmaking for energy and industrial systems 

• Enable rapid prototyping and testing in virtual environments 

• Support more efficient use of experimental facilities and supercomputing resources 

• Lower barriers for smaller institutions and companies to participate in advanced R&D 

Rather than focusing solely on individual projects, DOE intends for the Genesis Mission to lay the groundwork for a generational shift in how the United States tackles energy, climate, manufacturing, healthrelated, and national security challenges. For the engineering community, this could mean new capabilities for designing, validating, and scaling technologies that were previously too costly or complex to pursue.  

Read the official Notice of Funding Opportunity at: DE-FOA-000361.