US announces $5 billion AI push to transform health, construction research

The Trump administration announced on Wednesday that the US is allocating $5 billion to use AI in addressing long-standing problems across multiple fields.

The agencies will use the funding to identify fundamental reasons of chronic diseases, computational drug design and develop longer-lasting building materials among other crucial tasks.

Michael Kratsios, chief technology advisor to US President Donald Trump said that scientists will have access to the Department of Energy’s supercomputers, AI and key infrastructure required to run algorithms experiments.

Kratsios further said: “The White House is helping bring together all of the different agencies that work on different domains to make them part of this larger effort on AI for science.”

According to a White House report released Tuesday night, the Trump administration also redesigned its strategy for how federal agencies expand investigator-initiated research grants, organization specific agency-led AI initiatives over conventional university funding.

This approach would give the administration more control over how the money is used, an area where Trump has struggled regarding science grants.

Notably, an appeal panel ruled against the Trump administration's proposal in January, holding it cannot terminate the National Institutes of Health grants awarded to universities conducting medical research.

AI models need significant data to scrutinize patterns and automate decision-making, given that the US government holds some of the world’s massive datasets including records on chemicals, strategic minerals, and patient health.