OpenAI and Microsoft are making massive investments in scientific research, as AI is becoming a national scientific infrastructure in the United States.
OpenAI and Microsoft have announced their support for the U.S. Department of Energy's national scientific research program, the Genesis Mission. Microsoft's $60 million investment package and OpenAI's $7 million in usage support total over 10 billion yen.
Advancing the next era of national science | OpenAI
Powering America's Genesis Mission: Microsoft's commitment to scientific discovery - The Official Microsoft Blog
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/07/22/powering-americas-genesis-mission-microsofts-commitment-to-scientific-discovery/
The Genesis Mission is a U.S. government national project that uses AI to accelerate scientific discovery. Seventeen national laboratories under the Department of Energy, universities, and companies are collaborating to connect federally held scientific data, supercomputers, AI, and experimental facilities into a common research platform. Beyond simply providing researchers with chat AI, the mission aims to streamline the entire process—from hypothesis testing and simulation to experimentation and results analysis—within a single continuous flow, ultimately doubling the productivity and impact of American research and development within 10 years.
24 companies, including Microsoft, Google, NVIDIA, OpenAI, AWS, and AMD, are participating in the US government's 'Genesis Mission' to promote the use of AI for scientific discovery - GIGAZINE
In research to find new materials, researchers repeatedly examine a vast number of candidates on computers, verify promising candidates experimentally, and select the next candidates based on the results. Even with high-performance AI, it is difficult to streamline the entire research process if research data, computers, and experimental equipment are managed separately. The Genesis Mission plans to connect the equipment and information necessary for research, enabling AI to be used not as a part of the research process, but as a research infrastructure.
OpenAI will provide approximately $4 million (about 650 million yen) in usage slots for its AI program creation support tool, 'Codex,' to around 2,000 researchers affiliated with national research institutes and universities. This support aims to enable researchers to utilize program creation and inference functions in their daily work, allowing them to focus more on experiments and verification. In addition, OpenAI will provide $3 million (about 490 million yen) in API usage slots for large-scale scientific research, and will also offer a system where participating researchers can use up to $10 million (about 1.6 billion yen) worth of APIs if they pay $2.5 million (about 410 million yen).
Microsoft has announced it will invest a total of $60 million (approximately 9.8 billion yen) in providing computing resources and technical support for its cloud platform, Microsoft Azure. The plan is not only to provide computing resources to research institutions, but also to have experts support them in everything from designing and implementing AI systems to security management and continuous operation. To reduce the burden on researchers of coordinating individually with multiple departments within Microsoft, the company has also announced the creation of a new liaison office, 'Scientific Partnership Advancing Research & Knowledge (SPARK),' to consolidate research projects.
Furthermore, as a foundation for unifying the research process, access to 'Microsoft Discovery,' a research platform that combines AI-driven predictions, computer simulations, and actual experimental results into a single environment, is also provided. It is envisioned that the AI will suggest the next experimental conditions, and the results obtained will be analyzed to inform new experiments.
In December 2025, 24 organizations, including Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services, and AMD, signed an agreement with the Department of Energy, establishing a public-private partnership to support the Genesis Mission. Within this framework, OpenAI explains that 'researchers will continue to play a role in defining questions, selecting methods, and verifying the output of AI.' AI is expected to be integrated into national-scale research infrastructure alongside supercomputers and experimental equipment.
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