NSF AI Grants

NSF 26-513 establishes State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs to widen access to AI compute for scientific discovery, with approximately 100,000,000 dollars available and about 10 awards anticipated per cycle at 4,000,000 to 12,000,000 dollars each over five years. A hub coordinates a state or multi-state consortium and funds three things that are usually unfunded in AI infrastructure efforts: AI infrastructure professionals such as systems administrators, engineers and cybersecurity specialists; AI-for-science facilitators who advise domain researchers on how to actually use AI methods; and faculty training plus instructional material development. It also funds workforce development offering stackable credentials in data engineering, research software engineering and GPU programming. The structural signal in this solicitation is that NSF has concluded the bottleneck in AI-enabled research is human rather than hardware, and is paying for the expertise layer between a researcher and a cluster. The restriction of one award per state or multi-state region makes this a coordination instrument rather than an open competition: institutions within a region are expected to consolidate into a single proposal, which means partnership-building should begin well before the submission window. Deadlines recur on the first Wednesday in November annually, with the current deadline 4 November 2026 followed by 3 November 2027.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) - NSF Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)/Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). This program focuses on cutting-edge technologies in deep learning-based AI systems and AI-based hardware, emphasizing next-generation AI technologies that are safe, reliable, fair, robust, privacy-preserving, and efficient. It explicitly includes Computer Vision Based AI Technologies. Small businesses can receive non-dilutive funding for high-risk, high-impact technologies with strong commercial potential.

National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Operations Center (NSF 26-513) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) with contributions from other federal agencies (e.g., DOE, NIH, NOAA, DARPA, NASA, NIST). The NAIRR Operations Center represents a major funding opportunity, supporting national-scale data infrastructure that powers open, data-intensive and AI-driven research and education.

NSF 26-513, opened 4 August 2026, is a 100 million dollar cooperative-agreement programme establishing State and Regional Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Hubs. Its purpose is to extend frontier AI compute, data and software capability to institutions and regions that do not currently have it, rather than to deepen capacity where it already exists. NSF anticipates up to ten awards of 4 to 12 million dollars each over five years, and applies a hard geographic rule: only one award per state or multi-state region in this round. That single constraint dominates strategy, because it converts the competition from a national field into an intra-state one - the practical first step for most applicants is to find out who else in their state is preparing a proposal and to consolidate rather than compete. Awards are cooperative agreements, not standard grants, so NSF retains substantial operational involvement in how the hub is run. Proposals must be led by a U.S.-accredited two- or four-year institution of higher education or a U.S.-based non-profit non-academic organisation, and the consortium must include at least one institution of higher education, with private industry, philanthropy and state or local government participation expected. Community colleges are explicitly eligible as lead institutions, which is a deliberate widening relative to most NSF AI programmes. Full proposals are due 4 November 2026, and the solicitation sets the same first-Wednesday-in-November deadline to repeat annually.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot, led by NSF with DOE and 13 federal agencies alongside 28 industry and non-profit partners, allocates compute, datasets, pre-trained models and platforms to US researchers and educators who would otherwise be priced out of frontier-scale AI work. What distinguishes NAIRR from a straight GPU credit programme is breadth: the allocation can combine HPC time on DOE national laboratory systems, commercial cloud credits, curated AI-ready datasets and access to pre-trained models, matched to the project by resource matching committees after peer review. The call has no fixed closing date. It has been open since 6 May 2024 and runs until the end of the pilot or until all resources have been committed, operating on monthly review cycles in which proposals submitted by the 15th of a month are typically decided by the end of that month. Awards are for twelve months. Applications require a submission form plus a three-page PDF proposal, and a lighter Start-Up track with an approximately two-week turnaround exists for teams that need modest resources quickly or want to establish feasibility before requesting a larger allocation. Graduate students may apply with a support letter from a faculty advisor, which is unusual among federal compute programmes and makes NAIRR one of the few realistic routes to significant compute for a doctoral project.

NSF ACCESS (Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services and Support) provides access to dozens of high-performance computing systems including GPU clusters at no cost for academic research and education. The program replaced XSEDE in 2022 and offers tiered allocation levels from small-scale pilot experiments to large-scale research campaigns. Recent hardware upgrades through the NAIRR Pilot added NVIDIA H100 GPUs at multiple sites. Particularly valuable for AI/ML researchers needing GPU time for model training, inference, and large-scale experiments without existing funding.

Future CoRe is NSF CISE's consolidated core research solicitation, merging eleven previously separate programmes into a single entry point, and it is the broadest available route to funding for foundational artificial intelligence and machine learning research in the United States. It supports foundational computing research and education with strong emphasis on AI and machine learning - theory, algorithms, systems and applications - alongside the rest of the computing research portfolio. The structural change that matters most to applicants is the move away from hard deadlines. Proposals may be submitted at any time, but target dates have been added to organise review into batches, with target dates of 10 September 2026 and 4 February 2027 for the relevant tracks. In practice a proposal submitted well away from a target date waits longer for a panel, so the target dates function as soft deadlines for anyone who needs a timely decision. The solicitation covers small, medium and large project classes with different ceilings; the figures here reflect the medium class, where most AI and machine learning foundations work is funded. For researchers whose work does not map onto a named NSF AI programme - the AI Institutes, the AI infrastructure hubs, or the geosciences and health collaborations - Future CoRe is the default home, and the eleven constituent programmes within it offer meaningful choice over which review community sees the proposal.

AI Forge: Accelerating AI breakthroughs for national security is sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) & U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). A joint DARPA and NSF research and development program to catalyze breakthroughs in AI for national security. It focuses on aligning government, academia, and industry around foundational research to accelerate advances in AI interpretability, control, and adversarial robustness.

NAIRR Pilot Resource Requests to Advance AI Research is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with DOE and others. Provides access to computing, model, platform, and educational resources for AI research projects, including those involving edge computing, distributed systems, and AI at the edge. Projects awarded for 12 months.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot, led by NSF in partnership with DOE, 13 federal agencies, and 28 industry and nonprofit partners, democratizes access to the resources needed for AI research. Rather than cash, awardees receive an integrated ecosystem of compute (HPC allocations and cloud GPU credits), curated datasets, pretrained models, and software platforms. Proposals are reviewed on a rolling monthly basis (submissions by the 15th are typically reviewed by month-end), and projects run for 12 months. A lighter Start-Up track offers a roughly two-week turnaround. All results must be open and publishable. The pilot has supported more than 600 projects and 6,000 students across all 50 states.

NAIRR Pilot Start-Up Project Request for Entry-Level AI Compute Access is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in collaboration with U.S. federal agencies and industry partners. The NAIRR Pilot Start-Up Project Request is the entry-level track of the National AI Research Resource, giving researchers new to NAIRR quick access to GPU and AI computing resources for proof-of-concept work and scaling studies before submitting a full Research request.

Artificial Intelligence SBIR/STTR Program is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). This NSF SBIR/STTR topic focuses on cutting-edge technologies in deep learning-based AI systems and AI-based hardware. It emphasizes next-generation AI technologies that are safe, reliable, fair, robust, privacy-preserving, and efficient in terms of computational resources, energy, and training data size.

National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Workforce Development Programs (Various Initiatives) is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF has multiple initiatives focused on building a world-class workforce for the AI era. These investments include creating educational tools, materials, curricula, scholarships, and fellowships to enhance learning and create an AI-ready workforce.

AI Forge is a joint DARPA-NSF initiative, developed in close collaboration with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation at NIST, to close what DARPA calls the mission-ready AI gap for national security. It is worth tracking early because of what it is structurally, not just what it funds. Rather than running a conventional solicitation, DARPA and NSF are establishing a standing forum comprising industry, university and government participants that will identify, fund and manage university-led research efforts against challenges defined in the AI Forge Critical AI Challenges for National Security report - a report that synthesizes expert input from industry and government into 15 research challenges across three thrust areas. A nonprofit entity will administer the forum. The three priority areas are drawn directly from America's AI Action Plan: AI interpretability, AI control, and adversarial robustness. That is an unusually concrete scoping for a national-security AI programme, and it signals where federal money for foundational AI safety and security research is heading - toward making AI reliable and predictable in high-stakes settings, understandable to its operators, and secure in contested environments. DARPA reported receiving nearly 130 responses to the AI Forge RFI, which it characterized as validating urgent nationwide demand for this kind of public-private ecosystem. For academic groups, the significance is that AI Forge is explicitly designed to channel talent through fast-paced, high-risk/high-reward, university-led project ventures and to enable exchange of people and ideas across universities, frontier AI companies and government - a route into national-security AI funding that does not require becoming a defense prime. Interested parties should respond to or monitor RFI DARPA-SN-26-80 on SAM.gov and watch both the DARPA AI Forge program page and NSF's TIP directorate page for the first funded project ventures.

NSF AI Research Institute on Interaction for AI Assistants (NSF ARIA) is a grant from the NSF that funds the development of next-generation AI assistants that are safer, more effective, and better able to adapt to individual user needs. Led by Brown University as part of NSF's $100 million National AI Research Institutes initiative, NSF ARIA is one of five interdisciplinary institutes supported alongside partners Capital One and Intel. The program is aligned with the White House AI Action Plan and Executive Order 14277 on advancing AI education. Eligible applicants include universities, nonprofits, state and local governments, and for-profit organizations. Award amounts vary; details on future funding cycles are available at nsf.gov.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot (NAIRR) is a program from the National Science Foundation (NSF) that funds the creation of an operations center to manage and expand the National AI Research Resource. It provides U.S. researchers and educators with sustained access to advanced AI tools, data, and expertise to support innovation, workforce development, and national competitiveness in artificial intelligence. The program prioritizes research on AI safety, evaluations, and societal impacts, and may provide up to $1,000,000 in compute credits for qualifying AI safety research. Eligible applicants include U.S. researchers, educators, and institutions seeking access to cutting-edge AI computing infrastructure and resources.

The NAIRR Pilot is the single most important entry point for US researchers who need serious AI compute and cannot buy it, and its defining characteristic is that you apply for resources, not funding. Led by NSF with 13 federal agencies and 28 industry and non-profit partners, it was created to democratise access to the compute, data and models that otherwise concentrate frontier AI research inside a handful of well-capitalised labs. The resource catalogue spans GPU clusters (NVIDIA H100 and A100), commercial cloud environments, AI-ready datasets and pre-trained models, drawing on roughly 3.77 exaFLOPS of federal capacity including DOE national laboratory systems. A practical detail worth knowing before writing anything: parts of the catalogue - certain pre-trained models, datasets and platforms - are accessible without a formal proposal at all, so the first step should be checking whether what you need already sits behind an open door. For everything else, the application is deliberately light by federal standards: an electronic form plus a three-page PDF, reviewed by peers against alignment with focus areas, project readiness, technical feasibility, necessity of the requested resources, team expertise and resource justification. The cycle is monthly and continuous - submissions in by the 15th are typically decided by the end of that month - and the call stays open until the pilot programme ends or all resources are committed, whichever comes first. That last clause is the real deadline. The pilot has already supported more than 600 research and education projects reaching 6,000 students across all 50 states, and is transitioning toward a permanent operations centre under NSF solicitation 25-546. One administrative trap catches applicants repeatedly: submissions must come from an institutional email address, and personal accounts such as Gmail are rejected outright.

The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot provides U.S.-based researchers and educators with access to advanced computing, pre-trained AI models, datasets, and platform and educational resources through a shared national infrastructure funded by NSF, DOE, and private and non-profit partners. The Resource Requests track supports full research projects with 12-month allocations, reviewed on a monthly cycle (submissions by the 15th typically decided by month's end). The pilot has supported more than 600 research and education projects across all 50 states, backed by roughly $100 million in private-sector in-kind contributions.

The NAIRR Pilot Start-Up Project Request is the entry-level track of the National AI Research Resource, giving researchers new to NAIRR quick access to GPU and AI computing resources for proof-of-concept work and scaling studies before submitting a full Research request. Projects receive a three-month allocation of a single resource, with review decisions returned within 2-3 weeks and projects required to begin within two weeks of award notification. Resources include up to 2,000 GPU-hours across systems such as PSC Bridges-2, Purdue Anvil AI, SDSC Expanse AI, and TACC Vista.

AI & Machine Learning Grants 2026-2027 is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF SBIR for AI & Machine Learning program focuses on cutting-edge technologies in deep learning-based AI systems and AI-based hardware. It includes healthcare AI, such as disease detection, drug discovery, clinical decision support, medical imaging, and patient monitoring. The program emphasizes next-generation AI technologies that are safe, reliable, fair, robust, privacy-preserving, and computationally efficient.

National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) with multiple federal agencies and private sector partners. The NAIRR is a scalable national infrastructure providing the research and education communities with access to critical computing, software, data, models, educational resources, and expertise to advance AI innovation, including resources for developing trustworthy and responsib…

Special Funding Opportunity: National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Research Institutes in Partnership with the National Science Foundation (Theme 6: AI-Augmented Learning) is sponsored by Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and National Science Foundation (NSF). This special funding opportunity supports National AI Research Institutes, with IES providing partial support for Theme 6: AI-Augmented Learning. The broad goals include advancing AI research, accelerating transformational AI-powered innovation, and growing the AI workforce.

NSF AI Education and Workforce Development is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF invests in the AI workforce at every stage of education and career development, focusing on equipping educators and practitioners with AI skills, developing institutional capacity for AI research and development, and creating AI systems that enhance teaching and learning for…

National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF) / U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot is a program from the National Science Foundation and U. S. Department of Energy that provides researchers with access to advanced AI computing infrastructure, software, data, models, and educational resources.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) - Small Business Innovation Research / Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR/STTR) Program is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). America's Seed Fund, powered by the NSF, funds U. S. -based startups and small businesses developing deep technologies with commercial and societal potential, including cutting-edge AI systems and AI-based hardware.

National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot is sponsored by U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with 13 federal agencies and 28 industry partners. The NAIRR Pilot aims to democratize access to AI compute, datasets, and pre-trained models. Access is open to researchers, educators, and students at U. S. -based academic institutions, nonprofits, federal agencies, tribal agencies, and even startups with federal grants.

National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot: NAIRR Classroom is sponsored by National Science Foundation (NSF). The NAIRR pilot program aims to democratize access to AI innovation and support the development of trustworthy AI. The NAIRR Classroom focus area specifically provides infrastructure support to educators to enable training on AI technologies and their responsible approaches.

AI Forge: Accelerating AI breakthroughs for national security is sponsored by Defense Advanced Research Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and National Science Foundation (NSF). A joint DARPA and NSF research and development program to catalyze breakthroughs in AI for national security, working with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) at NIST.