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Utilizing the Full Power of Empire AI is a Simons Foundation request for applications that funds basic science research making genuine use of multinode GPU clusters on New York State's Empire AI supercomputing consortium.
The framing is deliberately specific: the Foundation is not funding AI applications generally but research that requires clusters of GPUs across multiple nodes, which excludes the large volume of scientific machine learning that runs comfortably on a single node and is therefore not compute-constrained.
Target fields named in the call are computational astrophysics and physics, computational biology, mathematics, neuroscience and computational physical chemistry, together with foundational machine learning models, so the programme spans both AI-for-science and the development of foundation models themselves.
The combination of a 6,000,000 dollar commitment across 6 to 12 awards, no published per-award ceiling, and an instruction that budgets should reflect the proposed research signals that the Foundation expects ambitious, compute-heavy proposals rather than incremental ones. The award period runs 1 June 2027 to 31 May 2029 against a 1 December 2026 deadline at 12 p. m.
Eastern time. The binding constraint is institutional: eligibility is restricted to faculty at the nine Empire AI consortium member institutions, which makes this one of the most geographically concentrated significant AI funding opportunities currently open, and effectively a New York State research-capacity instrument rather than a national competition.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: The principal investigator must hold a tenure-track or tenured faculty position at one of the Empire AI consortium member institutions: Columbia University, Cornell University, the City University of New York, the State University of New York, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York University, the University of Rochester, Rochester Institute of Technology, or the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Researchers outside those nine institutions are ineligible to lead, and this is the single most important filter on the competition; the practical route in for an outside collaborator is as a co-investigator on an application led by eligible faculty. All applicants must hold a Ph.D., M.D. or equivalent degree. Non-tenure-track research faculty, postdoctoral researchers and staff scientists cannot serve as PI. Substantively, proposals must make real use of multinode clusters of GPUs, so a project that can be executed on a single GPU node is mismatched regardless of its scientific merit, and reviewers can be expected to probe whether the compute requirement is genuine. The named target areas are computational astrophysics and physics, computational biology, mathematics, neuroscience and computational physical chemistry, together with foundational machine learning models. Applications are submitted as full applications through the Simons Award Manager system by the deadline of 1 December 2026 at 12 p.m. Eastern time, and must include a proposal narrative, biosketches, a budget and organizational assurances documentation. Institutional signing official approval is required before submission, which means internal institutional deadlines will precede the Foundation's and applicants should start the research office process well in advance. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows the Simons Foundation has committed 6,000,000 US dollars over a two-year period to be distributed across an expected 6 to 12 awards, and states that the total amount requested should reflect the proposed research rather than setting a per-award maximum. Dividing the committed total by the expected award count gives a per-award range of roughly 500,000 to 1,000,000 US dollars, which is what amount_min and amount_max record; this is arithmetic from the Foundation's own published figures rather than a stated per-award band, and because the Foundation invites budgets scaled to the proposed research, individual awards may fall outside that range. The absence of a published ceiling is genuinely unusual and should be read as an invitation to propose compute-intensive work at a serious scale rather than as licence for an unconstrained budget. Applicants should note that the award period runs 1 June 2027 to 31 May 2029, nearly eighteen months after the 1 December 2026 deadline, so this is not a source of near-term funding and budgets must be constructed for costs two to four years out. The Foundation's wider grantmaking provides useful calibration: Simons funds at considerably larger scale than most private AI funders, and a 6,000,000 dollar programme split across at most a dozen awards places these among the larger single-investigator-led AI-for-science grants available anywhere. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
Applications for Simons Foundation Utilizing the Full Power of Empire AI Request for Applications for Multinode GPU Cluster Research in Computational Science and Foundational Machine Learning are due December 1, 2026. Build your timeline backwards from this date to cover registrations, approvals, and final submission checks.
Simons Foundation Utilizing the Full Power of Empire AI Request for Applications for Multinode GPU Cluster Research in Computational Science and Foundational Machine Learning is funded by Simons Foundation. Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
Simons Centers of Excellence at Historically Black Colleges and Universities is sponsored by Simons Foundation. Funded by Simons Foundation International and administered by the Simons Foundation, this program supports up to two ambitious research and training Centers of Excellence (CoEs) at HBCU institutions. It prioritizes cutting-edge computational, data-driven, and theoretical research in areas including mathematics, neuroscience, physics, and ecology/evolutionary biology, while building sustainable pathways for students into graduate STEM programs.
Utilizing the Full Power of Empire AI 2027 is a 6,000,000 US dollar Simons Foundation request for applications funding two-year research programmes that build and use foundational machine learning models on the multinode GPU clusters of New York State's Empire AI infrastructure. The Foundation expects to select six to twelve proposals, which implies a working per-award range of roughly 500,000 to 1,000,000 US dollars; the amounts recorded here are derived from that pool and award count rather than from a published per-award cap, because the RFA explicitly states there is no maximum budget total for an individual award. Applicants should therefore size budgets to the science rather than to a ceiling. The scientific scope is deliberately restricted to computational problems of fundamental importance in astrophysics, biology, mathematics, neuroscience and physical chemistry, and proposals must genuinely require multinode GPU capacity, so work that would run on a single node is a poor fit. Eligibility is the binding constraint: the principal investigator must hold a tenure-track or tenured faculty position at one of nine named Empire AI consortium institutions, namely Columbia, Cornell, CUNY, SUNY, RPI, NYU, the University of Rochester, RIT or the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Additional principal investigators may join from non-consortium institutions through subcontract. All applicants and collaborators must hold a PhD, MD or equivalent, there are no citizenship requirements, Simons Foundation and Flatiron Institute W-2 employees are excluded, and the Foundation does not fund institutions in China or Hong Kong. The award period runs 1 June 2027 to 31 May 2029 and applications close at 12 p.m. Eastern on 1 December 2026.
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