DOE

DOE's Genesis Mission Adds $159 Million in Phase II AI Science Awards as Its Platform Milestone Goes Unconfirmed

On 8 October the Energy Department announced twelve Phase II awards worth $159 million under the Genesis Mission, its programme to use AI to speed up scientific research at the national laboratories. Recipients include Commonwealth Fusion Systems, MIT, Harvard, Fermilab, Argonne and Oak Ridge. Projects range from a grid model, GridFM 2.0, at $11.5 million, to nuclear design work. With six new Phase I awards, the first-year cohort is now 297 projects.

The same day DOE launched a graduate fellowship pilot: about 100 PhD students on four-year paths, up to $100 million in total, with $20 million in fiscal 2027 and the rest subject to appropriations.

Where it came from

The President launched Genesis by executive order in November 2025. In December, 24 companies signed agreements to take part, including Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, xAI, IBM and Oracle. DOE set up a consortium to run the partnerships. The first selections came on 22 July 2026: 278 awards across 342 institutions, led by labs, universities and some companies. The largest was a $60 million, three-year AI project for nuclear energy. We covered the launch in our earlier Genesis post.

In September an advisory subcommittee of DOE’s Office of Science set out 33 national science and technology challenges for the mission, including a five-year AI effort on magnet supply chains and a grid-connected fusion pilot plant by the early 2030s.

The platform deadline

The executive order gave DOE about 270 days to show an initial operating capability of the shared AI platform on at least one challenge. That deadline passed around late August. Accenture Federal Services has been leading a sprint to deliver an early capability on critical minerals, working with Databricks. DOE hasn’t publicly announced that the milestone was met.

Data centres on federal land

The compute side is being built mostly with private money. DOE named four lab sites for AI data centres in 2025: Idaho, Oak Ridge, Paducah and Savannah River.

  • At Paducah in Kentucky, DOE picked Brookfield and NextEra in July for a privately funded campus of up to $100 billion, with up to 4.6 gigawatts of dedicated generation, gas and batteries. It still needs state utility approval.
  • At Savannah River in South Carolina, the National Nuclear Security Administration selected Amentum and DC Blox for a 1-gigawatt site with on-site generation, gas first and nuclear later.
  • At Portsmouth in Ohio, SB Energy and AEP Ohio announced a 10-gigawatt project in March.

DOE has identified 16 possible federal sites in total. Developer picks for Oak Ridge and Idaho haven’t been announced.

The budget question

Genesis has so far been funded from existing DOE science and lab budgets, plus partner contributions. The awards are real money, but small next to the private data centre commitments. For Congress, the question is whether to give Genesis its own line. The fellowship’s outyear funding depends on that. And the stopgap funding law, which runs to 11 December, keeps DOE science at last year’s levels until a full-year bill passes.