Google.org Opens $30M AI for Science Challenge with Grants Up to $3M

Google.org has opened its 2026 Impact Challenge: AI for Science, a $30 million global program offering individual grants between $500,000 and $3 million to organizations using artificial intelligence to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.

The program arrives as federal science budgets face sustained political pressure, making philanthropic capital from tech companies an increasingly important funding channel for AI-driven research.

Two Domains, One Deadline

The challenge targets two scientific areas. The first — AI for Health & Life Sciences — seeks proposals advancing genomics, neurology, and human health research. The second — AI for Climate Resilience & Environmental Science — covers biodiversity, agriculture, and sustainable systems.

Proposals are evaluated on scientific ambition with quantifiable impact metrics, innovative and responsible AI deployment, realistic execution plans, team expertise, and scalability across geographies and disciplines. Google specifically wants projects with open-source or foundational dataset components, signaling a preference for work that benefits the broader research community.

The deadline is April 17, 2026, with applications submitted through the Google.org Impact Challenge portal.

More Than Money

Beyond the grant funding, selected organizations enter a six-month Google.org Accelerator program featuring pro bono technical assistance from Google specialists and access to Google Cloud credits. For research teams that lack enterprise-grade compute infrastructure, the cloud credits alone could unlock experiments that would otherwise be cost-prohibitive.

Eligible applicants include nonprofits, social enterprises, academic institutions, and research institutions worldwide — a broader net than most federal AI programs cast.

What Grant Seekers Should Do Now

With grant sizes rivaling many federal mechanisms and a faster timeline than typical government funding cycles, this is one of the largest single AI-for-science calls open to nonprofits in 2026. Organizations already doing AI-adjacent work in health or environmental science should treat April 17 as a hard target.

The strongest applications will pair deep domain expertise with a clear AI methodology and a plan for open dissemination. Researchers can use platforms like Granted to identify complementary federal and foundation funding that could extend a Google.org award into a multi-source strategy.

In-depth analysis of AI funding trends is available on the Granted blog.