Energy debuts new Genesis Mission, quantum computing initiatives
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The department announced $159 million in new phase II Genesis Mission project awards, $96 million for early-career researchers and a new graduate fellowship program, along with an effort to advance the development of fault-tolerant quantum computers.
The Energy Department on Thursday unveiled new funding and training opportunities tied to the Genesis Mission — the Trump administration’s push to use artificial intelligence and advanced computing capabilities to accelerate the nation’s scientific research and technological innovation — as well as a new effort designed to further the nation’s quantum computing development.
The announcements were made as part of the White House’s AI Science Summit, which the administration billed as an opportunity to push a whole-of-nation approach to leading-edge scientific research and development.
As part of the event, Energy announced the launch of a Genesis Mission Graduate Fellowship Pilot — an effort to accelerate American students’ pursuits of doctorates with competency in both AI and other relevant scientific and engineering disciplines. The department said the program, which has up to $100 million in total funding, will include “two high-impact, hands-on research experiences, one at a DOE National Laboratory/User Facility and another with industry.”
Energy’s Office of Science also unveiled the selection of 67 early-career scientists to receive a combined $96 million through its 2026 Early Career Research Program, which is designed to help fund innovative research projects. The department said the awardees represent 39 universities, 11 national laboratories and Office of Science User Facilities, and 26 states.
Additionally, Energy announced its latest batch of Genesis Mission awards, with 12 phase II projects receiving a total of $159 million. The department offers project funding through two sequential tiers, with phase I awards used for proof-of-concept purposes and phase II funding being used to actualize concepts. Thursday’s announcement raises the total number of phase II projects to 14.
In a press call ahead of the announcements, Energy’s Undersecretary for Science Darío Gil said the number of overall Genesis Mission projects that have received funding demonstrates the rapid progress that has already been made to carry out the Genesis Mission’s goals.
“With this set of awards, we've completed the first construction of the portfolio for the launch of the Genesis Mission,” Gil said. “So that portfolio that has been constructed now over many months has 297 teams across all 50 states as the inaugural cohort of the Genesis Mission effort.”
Energy also announced on Thursday the release of Quantum Genesis Priority Applications, which it said are “a set of eight key scientific utility problems” to help guide U.S. development of the world’s first fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer. The effort builds on the department’s launch of the Quantum Genesis initiative in June to deploy such an advanced computer for scientific research by 2028.
“These Priority Applications, along with the other elements of Quantum Genesis, will bring domain scientists from across disciplines into direct partnership with quantum researchers,” Energy said in a release. “Together, they will integrate quantum computing into real-world scientific workflows and benchmark performance against today’s most advanced supercomputing methods.”
The department similarly launched a Quantum Genesis Q Competition last month offering up to $215 million in total planned funding to U.S. companies that submit proposals on ways “to deploy quantum computers with at least 100 logical qubits that are capable of performing hundreds of millions fault-tolerant operations and scientific demonstration programs.”