Google Announces $20 Million In Funding For Scientific AI Research

Google announced $20 million in funding for AI scientific research yesterday during the inaugural AI for Science Forum, hosted by the Royal Society and Google DeepMind. The tech giant will also provide $2 million in cloud credits.

The financial support will be provided by Google.org—the charitable arm of the tech giant—and allocated to non-profit and academic organizations globally that are currently using AI to address complex problems across multiple fields of science.

“We’ll work with leaders internally across our Google DeepMind, Google Research and other AI-focused teams as well as external experts to identify and announce organizations,” states the announcement shared on Google’s blog.

With this new funding, Google.org is focusing on supporting the next AI scientific breakthroughs and is interested in research and investigations related to topics like sustainability, experimental biology, neglected disease research, and materials science.

The tech giant also announced $2 million in Google Cloud Credits as well as pro bono technical expertise from the company’s workers. This new funding adds to the more than $200 million the company has provided to accelerate scientific work.

The company highlighted this year’s Nobel Award in Chemistry, awarded to Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for the advanced AI program AlphaFold developed by Google DeepMind, currently being used by over 2 million researchers around the world for different purposes including Parkinson’s treatment and the fight against malaria.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton—a former Google employee.

Other tech giants have been supporting AI developments in science. A few days ago, AWS announced it will provide up to $110 million in credits for scientific researchers to access its cloud data centers.