DOE to Build Nine New Supercomputers at National Labs

The Department of Energy announced nine new supercomputers this week, to be built at three national labs in partnership with technology companies. Some will be operational as early as next year, and one at Argonne National Lab is planned to be the largest AI supercomputer within the lab system, DOE said. In their announcements, the labs said the new computers will accelerate scientific AI models and discoveries.

The announcements do not note how much of the funding for each supercomputer will come from the private partners, which include HPE, Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. DOE’s announcement for the Oak Ridge National Lab supercomputers states that “with more than $1 billion in public-private investment, DOE, together with AMD and HPE, is delivering new AI capacity in record time.” The announcement from Los Alamos National Lab states that “the project will be supported through anticipated future funding, contingent upon the availability of appropriations.”

At Argonne, two new supercomputers will advance discoveries at experimental facilities such as the Advanced Photon Source, Argonne Director Paul Kearns said. For example, they will help researchers identify patterns in complex datasets from these facilities that would be impossible to detect manually, according to Michael Papka, the division director of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. The applications range from materials discovery to climate modeling to AI agents that can autonomously design and interpret experiments, Papka added.

Argonne is partnering with Oracle and Nvidia on the two supercomputers. Construction of the Equinox supercomputer will begin immediately and is expected to finish in 2026. The announcement says Solstice will be the largest AI supercomputer in the lab system and does not provide an expected date for operation.

The announcement also includes three other supercomputers: Minerva, Janus, and Tara. Minerva and Tara will focus on AI prediction, and Janus will support workforce development in AI and high-performance computing.

Oak Ridge aims to deploy the Lux supercomputer in early 2026 and use it for research on fusion, fission, materials science, and quantum science. The Discovery supercomputer, to be delivered by HPE in 2028, will generate and analyze data “at unprecedented speeds” that will accelerate training of scientific AI models, the lab’s announcement states. Discovery will “significantly” outperform the lab’s current flagship supercomputer, Frontier, which is currently the second fastest supercomputer in the world as benchmarked by the TOP500 list. The fastest benchmarked supercomputer is El Capitan at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. However, the list may not be comprehensive, as China has stopped allowing benchmarking of some of its top supercomputers.

Oak Ridge Director Stephen Streiffer said the lab’s leadership in supercomputing has already “dramatically shortened researchers’ time from problem to solution,” and that the Discovery and Lux systems “will drive scientific innovation faster and farther than ever before.”

Los Alamos, one of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s labs, also announced two supercomputers in partnership with Nvidia and HPE. Notably, the announcement states that the Mission supercomputer will be used to assess and improve nuclear security without nuclear testing. The announcement came a day before President Donald Trump said on Truth Social that he had instructed the Department of Defense to “start testing our nuclear weapons on an equal basis” with other countries’ testing programs.

Mission will succeed the Crossroads supercomputer, which was completed by HPE in 2022 and is used for predictive weapon calculations. Vision, the other recently announced Los Alamos supercomputer, will support scientific research in areas such as national security, materials and nuclear science, and energy modeling. Los Alamos’ press release says Vision will “build on the success” of the Venado supercomputer installed at the lab in 2024, also in partnership with Nvidia and HPE. Both Mission and Vision are planned to be operational in 2027.

Spokespeople for the labs did not provide further details on the amount of funding provided by the labs or their partners for the supercomputers.

AI is a stated priority for the Trump administration, as it was for the Biden administration. In addition to the new supercomputers, DOE is soliciting proposals for AI data center development at its national labs.