US President Donald Trump has signed an executive order launching ‘Mission Genesis’, a federal programme intended to cement US leadership in artificial intelligence by linking national laboratories, supercomputers and vast government data sets into a single research platform.
The order, signed at the White House on 24 November, instructs agencies to expand access to high-performance computing and to open selected federal scientific databases to researchers and companies developing advanced AI systems. Commentators in Washington have already compared the initiative’s scale and central direction to the Second World War-era Manhattan Project.
Mission Genesis is focused on accelerating scientific discovery and industrial innovation. According to the text of the order, the programme aims to support the development of large ‘foundation models’ trained on federal scientific data, and to deploy AI agents capable of designing and running experiments in largely automated research workflows. Priority areas include advanced manufacturing, robotics, biotechnology, and nuclear fission and fusion research.
The White House has appointed Michael Kratsios, the president’s science adviser and head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, to oversee the programme. Day-to-day responsibility for the core computing infrastructure will sit with Energy Secretary Chris Wright, whose department operates many of the United States’ most powerful supercomputers and national laboratories. Wright has been tasked with creating an ‘American Science and Security Platform’ to give approved researchers centralised access to computing, data storage and specialist software tools.
Within 90 days, the Department of Energy (DoE) must identify the systems, data sets and facilities needed to support Mission Genesis, including resources that can be provided through partnerships with industry. The order also sets a 270-day deadline for the DoE and other agencies to demonstrate practical use of AI in critical national tasks, from materials science and energy technologies to defence-related modelling.
A central element is the creation of an integrated ecosystem for federal scientific data. The US government holds what is thought to be the world’s largest collection of publicly funded research data, accumulated over decades by agencies ranging from the National Institutes of Health to NASA and the Pentagon. Mission Genesis envisages using these data sets to train scientific AI models and domain-specific agents able to search for patterns, propose new lines of inquiry and optimise experimental design.
The programme builds on the existing National AI Research Resource (NAIRR), created in 2020 under the National AI Initiative Act. NAIRR was set up to pool computing capacity and data from multiple federal bodies and from private-sector partners such as OpenAI, Google and Palantir, and to make these resources available to researchers through a unified framework. Former NAIRR taskforce co-chair Lynne Parker has argued that sustained public investment in AI infrastructure is essential for maintaining US technological capabilities.
Mission Genesis also follows a series of recent US supercomputing announcements. In late October the Department of Energy said it would work with AMD to install two new systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. A further plan, disclosed in early November, will expand the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility with additional Nvidia processors for quantum and AI workloads. These projects are expected to be folded into the Genesis framework as part of a broader public-private effort to upgrade national computing capabilities.
Industry groups have welcomed the promise of expanded access to government computing and data resources, and major hardware suppliers including Nvidia, AMD, Dell and HPE are expected to play significant roles in supplying equipment for the new platform. At the same time, large-scale AI and supercomputing facilities place heavy demands on electricity generation and transmission infrastructure, an issue that has already prompted debate inside US energy policy circles.
Mission Genesis gives the Department of Energy and its laboratories a central role in US AI strategy, signalling a preference for state-backed infrastructure and scientific applications rather than consumer-focused regulation. The speed with which the promised computing resources and data access are delivered, and the extent to which they translate into measurable advances in research and technology, are likely to be key tests of the initiative in the wider international competition over AI.
