The National Science Foundation (NSF) is launching a pilot program to create the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR), a shared U.S. AI research infrastructure. The move fulfills part of President Biden’s October executive order on the responsible development of artificial intelligence. Ten other federal agencies have joined the NSF in launching the program, while tech giants Microsoft, Nvidia and Google have already pledged their support, along with more than 20 other private organizations across the industry, academic and non-profit sectors. The idea is to create shared access to information and things like cloud computing resources.

An NSF statement calls the pilot a “first step” in the effort to “strengthen and democratize access to critical resources necessary to power responsible AI discovery and innovation.”

A list of government partners — from the Department of Energy and NASA to the Department of Health and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office — is included, as is the current list of private participants, among them Amazon Web Services, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Intel and Meta Platforms.

The NSF lays out the pilot’s four main areas of operational focus:

• NAIRR Open will enable open AI research through access to diverse AI resources via the NAIRR Pilot Portal and coordinated allocations.  
• NAIRR Secure, co-led by NIH and DOE, will enable AI research requiring privacy and security-preserving resources and will assemble exemplar privacy preserving resources.   
• NAIRR Software will facilitate and investigate interoperable use of AI software, platforms, tools and services for NAIRR pilot resources.  
• NAIRR Classroom will reach new communities through education, training, user support and outreach. 

In addition to compute power and training, the NAIRR will provide access to AI models, datasets and software for U.S.-based AI researchers, who can apply for pilot access through the NAIRR website. NAIRR plans a second, broader call for research proposals in the spring.

Approved researchers “can use expensive, processing-power-heavy services like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Bedrock that they normally have to pay for with research funding,” writes The Verge.

Nvidia and Microsoft blog posts described their NAIRR participation. Microsoft specifies a donation of $20 million in Azure credits as well as access to Azure OpenAI Service models and privacy research. Nvidia says it will provide access to its AI Enterprise software and DGX Cloud.

The NAIRR initiative addresses part of President Biden’s 2023 executive order, focused largely on containing AI risks.