Nvidia found $1B under the couch to help secure American scientific computing dominance

Nvidia on Thursday scraped together some spare change to commit $1 billion — about 1/60th of its quarterly profits — to funding US scientific discovery over the next five years. The commitment, announced during an event in Washington, DC, aims to support the research and development of AI — or is it "super intelligence" now? — in fields including quantum computing, healthcare, and energy security. Nvidia's choice of technologies is not surprising as it has long aspired to fuse AI and high-performance computing. And while LLM training and inference pay Nvidia's bills, the GPU giant has continued to introduce new CUDA libraries specifically for AI-assisted quantum computing, healthcare, drug discovery, and physics simulation. The initiative is part of the US government's broader Genesis Mission, announced late last year by the Trump administration, which aims to use AI to drive the scientific discoveries necessary to ensure the country's continued technological leadership. …