The San Diego Supercomputer Center in La Jolla will run the nation's new artificial intelligence research hub after winning a $35 million federal grant.

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded the five-year cooperative agreement to SDSC, housed within UC San Diego's Halıcıoğlu School of Data Science and Computing, according to the university. The grant establishes the NSF National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Operations Center (NAIRR-OC), with SDSC serving as its operational backbone.

SDSC won't work alone. The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at the University of Texas at Austin will co-lead the effort.

The operations center grows out of a pilot program launched in January 2024 that connected roughly 900 research teams and educators across all 50 states with AI computing tools, data and software. The new award transitions that pilot into permanent national infrastructure.

"The NAIRR-OC is an important step toward making advanced AI resources genuinely usable by researchers, educators and students across the country," SDSC Director Frank Würthwein said in the Monday, Aug. 31 announcement. "By expanding access, we can enable ambitious ideas and discoveries that might otherwise remain out of reach."

SDSC Deputy Director Ashley Atkins serves as the center's co-principal investigator and deputy director.

Under the agreement, the operations center will coordinate private-sector, federal and academic resource providers. It will build a unified national portal where researchers can access computing power, AI models, datasets and training. The center will also provide documentation, user support and feedback channels.

The work spans fields including biomedicine, fusion energy, materials science and public health. The operations center aligns with the White House's Genesis Mission, a federal initiative to accelerate AI-driven scientific discovery, according to the university.

The award adds to UC San Diego's growing portfolio of federally funded computing projects. The campus also leads the NSF-supported National Data Platform and National Research Platform.

Separately, NSF awarded the National Data Platform a five-year, $24.5 million cooperative agreement, according to the university. As we reported Friday, Aug. 28, UC San Diego also landed a co-principal investigator role in a $37.5 million quantum computing center.

Dan Stanzione, associate vice president for research at UT Austin and executive director of TACC, said the center builds on a long SDSC-TACC collaboration. TACC leads the NSF Leadership-Class Computing Facility, which will supply computing and data infrastructure for the new center's users.

No specific launch date for the NAIRR portal has been announced.