Genesis Mission Spurs New Government-Industry Partnership Model

The Energy Department is partnering with industry to rapidly scale compute power and infrastructure needed to support the Genesis Mission.

The mission directs the department and its national labs to build a national discovery platform that connects supercomputers, AI systems and quantum technologies into an integrated infrastructure.

The November 2025 executive order launching the Genesis Mission directed Energy Secretary Chris Wright to “establish mechanisms for agency collaboration with external partners possessing advanced AI, data, or computing capabilities or scientific domain expertise,” including standardized partnership frameworks. Wright said at the 2026 AI+Expo last week that those partnerships are designed to help government and industry move faster to tackle major scientific and technological challenges, including quantum computing and nuclear fusion.

“It is a different kind of government business partnership, where we don’t go through a long process. We just say, let’s make a business deal that works for industry and government,” Wright said. 

Expanding Industry Partnerships

Since the mission launched, the department has made agreements with 24 companies interested in advancing Genesis Mission initiatives, including NVIDIA, AMD, Amazon Web Services and OpenAI.

“The government is not going to design the new biggest machines or build the new biggest machines. We have different strengths and different weaknesses, but we all need to be fast and flexible for cooperation,” said Wright. “Those words that were not synonymous with the government before.”

NVIDIA is helping Argonne National Laboratory build two supercomputers, Solstice and Equinox, under its Genesis Mission partnership.

“We’re bringing all the same technology, hardware, software and building blocks used by all major AI labs around the world to Argonne. And it’s there for all of the scientists and is a resource that DOE has for advancing science,” said Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and high-performance computing at NVIDIA.

Oak Ridge National Lab (ORNL) also announced a partnership with AMD to build two supercomputers, Lux and Discovery, as a part of the Genesis Mission. ORNL Associate Laboratory Director of Computing and Computational Sciences Gina Tourassi told GovCIO Media & Research that the Genesis Mission pulled together resources from industry and government to ensure Lux is operational by July 2026. 

“It’s a true co-investment model from two entities that are like minded in terms of science and mission. ORNL is not buying the system, but we are leasing it. We’re the ones operating it and providing the data, space, power and cooling,” said Tourassi.

Genesis Mission Enables Scientist Collaboration

ORNL is also leading the American Science Cloud (AmSC), a secure integrated environment designed to connect DOE computing and experimental facilities as part of the Genesis Mission’s broader effort to unify resources across the DOE ecosystem.

Tourassi said key scientific resources — including supercomputers, datasets and AI models — are often distributed across different DOE labs and facilities. While each lab maintains a specialized focus, she said scientific progress increasingly depends on making those resources interoperable and accessible.

“The AmSC is a building block in the Genesis Mission because it pulls all of these resources on the open science side and coordinates them,” said Tourassi. “I want to emphasize: we do not standardize science. We do not dictate how science is done. We’re trying to make science as interoperable as possible, so scientists do not reinvent pieces, so data sets are easily found for the different experiments.”

Tourassi added that the Genesis Mission is also reshaping the culture around scientific collaboration by encouraging researchers to think beyond individual projects and datasets toward broader national objectives.

“We’re not talking about my project, my data, my facility. We’re talking about our national capability … It takes a village and it takes a lot of resources,” said Tourassi.