WASHINGTON—The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Argonne National Laboratory, NVIDIA and Oracle today announced a landmark public-private partnership to deliver the DOE’s largest AI supercomputer and accelerate scientific discovery. The partnership will also immediately deliver world-class AI computing resources to DOE researchers while simultaneously building two next-generation AI supercomputing systems at Argonne National Laboratory. Today’s announcement is in accordance with President Trump’s Executive Orders, Accelerating Federal Permitting of Data Center Infrastructure and Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence.
The Solstice system, which will feature 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, will be the largest AI supercomputer in the DOE’s lab complex. Another system, called Equinox, will feature 10,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. Construction at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will immediately begin for the Equinox system. It is expected to be delivered in 2026. These AI systems will be seamlessly connected with DOE’s vast network of scientific instruments and data assets to address some of the nation’s most pressing challenges in energy, security, and discovery science.
As part of the partnership, Oracle will also immediately provide DOE with access to AI computing resources that use a combination of NVIDIA Hopper and Blackwell architectures. Scientists from Argonne and across the country will have access to new AI capabilities to drive technological leadership for science and energy applications.
“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 U.S. Secretary of Energy 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. Thanks to President Trump, we’re bringing new computing capacity online faster than ever before and turning shared innovation into national strength.”
“AI is the most powerful technology of our time, and science is its greatest frontier,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with the Department of Energy and Oracle, we’re building an AI factory that will serve as America’s engine for discovery, giving researchers access to the most advanced AI infrastructure to drive progress across fields ranging from healthcare research to materials.”
DOE has a long history of public-private partnerships that have provided American leadership in supercomputing for decades, and thanks to President Trump, the Energy Department is forging ahead with bold new partnerships. This latest collaboration exemplifies DOE’s new model, which enables shared investments and shared computing power between government and industry. As a result, the Energy Department is able to bring supercomputers online faster, ensuring America leads in artificial intelligence and scientific research.
“At Oracle, we are proud to partner with the Department of Energy to deliver sovereign, high-performance AI capabilities,” said Clay Magouyrk, CEO of Oracle. “Our collaboration at Argonne, tapping into the power of OCI, will provide a critical resource to address the nation’s most complex challenges and accelerate the next wave of scientific breakthroughs.”
“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,” said Paul Kearns, Argonne National Laboratory director. “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.”
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.
Taken together, all three phases of the partnership: immediate access to Oracle-provided AI resources, followed quickly by the delivery of Equinox and Solstice at Argonne, will dramatically decrease the time it takes researchers to move from idea to discovery. By bringing together the science and computing expertise in the DOE national lab complex with private sector capabilities in frontier AI systems, this new partnership will give DOE researchers cutting-edge tools to accelerate scientific breakthroughs and technology innovations to maintain America’s global AI leadership.
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