The U.S. Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, NVIDIA and Oracle on Oct. 28 announced a landmark public-private partnership to deliver the DOE’s largest AI supercomputer and accelerate scientific discovery. Argonne is also deploying three new AI computing systems through an existing partnership with NVIDIA, HPE and World Wide Technology.
The new partnership will immediately deliver world-class AI computing resources to DOE researchers while simultaneously building two next-generation AI supercomputing systems at University of Chicago-affiliated Argonne.
One system, called Solstice, will feature 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and will be the largest AI supercomputer in the DOE’s lab complex. Another system, called Equinox, will feature 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Construction at Argonne will immediately begin for the Equinox system, and it is expected to be delivered in 2026. These AI systems will be seamlessly connected with DOE’s vast network of scientific instruments and data assets to address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges in energy, security and discovery science.
As part of the partnership, Oracle will also immediately provide DOE with access to AI computing resources that use a combination of NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell architectures. Scientists from Argonne and across the country will have access to new AI capabilities to drive technological leadership for science and energy applications.
“Winning the AI race requires new and creative partnerships that will bring together the brightest minds and industries American technology and science has to offer,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. “The two Argonne systems and the collaboration between the Department of Energy, NVIDIA, and Oracle represent a new commonsense approach to computing partnerships. These systems will be a powerhouse for scientific and technological innovation. Thanks to President Trump, we’re bringing new computing capacity online faster than ever before and turning shared innovation into national strength.”
“AI is the most powerful technology of our time, and science is its greatest frontier,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with the Department of Energy and Oracle, we’re building an AI factory that will serve as America’s engine for discovery, giving researchers access to the most advanced AI infrastructure to drive progress across fields ranging from health care research to materials.”
DOE has a long history of public-private partnerships that have provided American leadership in supercomputing for decades. This latest collaboration exemplifies DOE’s new model, which enables shared investments and shared computing power between government and industry. As a result, the Energy Department is able to bring supercomputers online faster, ensuring America leads in artificial intelligence and scientific research.
“At Oracle, we are proud to partner with the Department of Energy to deliver sovereign, high-performance AI capabilities,” said Clay Magouyrk, CEO of Oracle. “Our collaboration at Argonne, tapping into the power of OCI, will provide a critical resource to address the nation’s most complex challenges and accelerate the next wave of scientific breakthroughs.”
“The Equinox and Solstice systems are designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific AI workflows, and we are collaborating with Oracle and NVIDIA to prepare thousands of researchers to effectively leverage the systems’ groundbreaking capabilities,” said Paul Kearns, director of Argonne National Laboratory. “This system will seamlessly connect to forefront DOE experimental facilities such as our Advanced Photon Source, allowing scientists to address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges through scientific discovery.”
The Equinox and Solstice systems will enable scientists and researchers to develop and train new frontier models and reasoning models for open science using NVIDIA Megatron-Core and scale them using the NVIDIA TensorRT™ inference software stack. These models will form the backbone of agentic AI workflows for scientific discovery.
AI computing systems to deliver unmatched AI inference
Argonne’s Minerva, Janus and Tara systems—built with support from NVIDIA, HPE and WWT—are tailored to accelerate AI inference and workforce development.
“Modern science isn’t just about having powerful computers anymore—it’s also about having powerful AI capabilities,” said Rick Stevens, a professor in the Department of Computer Science at UChicago and Argonne’s associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences. “Inference allows us to streamline how we test hypotheses, design experiments, and gain insights from large, complex datasets.”
Minerva, built in collaboration with World Wide Technology and NVIDIA, is designed to accelerate AI inference—the process of using a trained AI model to make predictions, identify patterns or generate insights from new data. Janus, built in collaboration with HPE and NVIDIA, will support the development of the next-generation workforce in AI and high-performance computing (HPC).
Argonne is also partnering with NVIDIA to acquire Tara, an AI inference system that will deliver a world-leading, integrated AI-HPC environment that converts exascale computation and AI advances into scientific breakthroughs and technological innovation, strengthening U.S. leadership in AI for science and technology.
All five AI computing systems headed to Argonne will dramatically decrease the time it takes researchers to move from idea to discovery. By bringing together the science and computing expertise in the DOE national lab complex with private sector capabilities in frontier AI systems, DOE researchers will gain access to cutting-edge tools to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and technology innovations to maintain America’s global AI leadership.
- Learn more about how Argonne is leveraging world-class expertise and computer power to develop and deploy AI at the Argonne website.
—Adapted from a release first published by Argonne National Laboratory.