Zuckerberg’s Biohub Partners With DOE, NIH to Invest $1.8 Billion in Biological Data for AI Models

A nonprofit co-founded by Mark Zuckerberg is working with the Energy Department, the National Institutes of Health and other funding partners to invest $1.8 billion in building biological data ready for artificial-intelligence models.

Biohub said Wednesday the investment will go toward funding, data, computation, and new measurement technology, with the goal of providing datasets that allow researchers to use AI models to find new ways of preventing and treating diseases.

As part of the investment, the DOE will invest more than $500 million across five years in lab measurement, modeling and computation to build an AI-ready open data resource.

NIH will coordinate the contribution of relevant datasets, repositories and knowledge bases developed through more than $500 million in prior federal investment aligned to the initiative, Biohub said.

The company will work with NIH to standardize the datasets for AI model training. Biohub said the investment may pave the way for a greater understanding of disease and open up new paths for cures.

“An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments digitally,” Biohub’s head of science Alex Rives said.