DOE, NNSA select partners for AI supercomputers

The Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory, NVIDIA, and Oracle have agreed to a public-private partnership to deliver the DOE's largest AI supercomputers, named Solstice and Equinox.

The October 28 announcement falls in line with President Trump's Executive Orders, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure and Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.

The systems: The Solstice system, which will feature 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, will be the largest AI supercomputer in the DOE's lab complex. The second system, called Equinox, will feature 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Construction at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will begin immediately for the Equinox system, with delivery expected in 2026.

These AI systems will be connected with DOE's network of scientific instruments and data assets to address some of the nation's most pressing challenges in energy, security, and discovery science, according to the DOE.

As part of the partnership, Oracle will also provide the DOE with immediate access to AI computing resources that use a combination of NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell architectures.

The use: 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.

The partnership will dramatically decrease the time it takes researchers to move from idea to discovery, according to the DOE.

Quotable: "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 Energy Secretary 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."

Paul Kearns, Argonne National Laboratory director, added, "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. 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."

More: In addition, also on October 28, the National Nuclear Security Administration's Los Alamos National Laboratory announced the selection of HPE and NVIDIA as partners for the development and deployment of two new supercomputers, named Mission and Vision.  The partnership will allow scientists to assess and modernize U.S. nuclear security without nuclear testing, according to the agency.