NVIDIA and Oracle Partner to Construct DOE's Largest AI Supercomputer for Scientific Breakthroughs
- MM24 News Desk
- Oct 30
- 3 min read
The U.S. Department of Energy is building its largest AI supercomputer, a system dubbed Solstice, powered by a record-breaking 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs and constructed in collaboration with Oracle. This monumental machine, alongside a companion system named Equinox, aims to deliver a combined 2,200 exaflops of AI performance, fundamentally accelerating the pace of scientific discovery for national security and open science missions.
Imagine a research tool so powerful it could analyze the molecular foundations of a new medicine, simulate the complex dynamics of climate change, and decipher the secrets of the universe—all at unprecedented speeds. This is the promise of two new AI supercomputers set to be built at Argonne National Laboratory through a landmark collaboration between NVIDIA and Oracle.
Announced today, the project centers on the Solstice system, which will be the DOE's largest AI supercomputer and feature an unprecedented 100,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs. A second system, Equinox, will incorporate 10,000 Blackwell GPUs and is expected to come online in the first half of 2026. Together, these machines will be interconnected by NVIDIA networking and deliver a staggering 2,200 exaflops of dedicated AI performance, reported NVIDIA.
So, what will this immense computational power actually do? It will enable scientists to develop and train massive new AI models, specifically "frontier models" and advanced AI reasoning models, for open scientific research. These models will be built using the NVIDIA Megatron-Core library and scaled for deployment with the NVIDIA TensorRT inference software stack. The ultimate goal is to create the backbone for agentic AI workflows—essentially, autonomous AI "scientists" that can formulate hypotheses, run experiments, and analyze results.
“AI is the most powerful technology of our time, and science is its greatest frontier,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “Together with Oracle, we’re building the Department of Energy’s largest supercomputer that will serve as America’s engine for discovery, giving researchers access to the most advanced AI infrastructure to drive progress across fields ranging from healthcare research to materials science.”
This initiative is a core part of a broader mission to boost R&D productivity and dramatically accelerate discovery within the next decade. The systems will support collaborations between NVIDIA, Argonne, and the DOE to develop these agentic scientists. The Solstice system, in particular, will be built using the DOE's new public-private partnership model, which includes industry investments and real-world use cases, according to NVIDIA.
The strategic importance of this project was underscored by government officials. “Winning the AI race requires new and creative partnerships that will bring together the brightest minds and industries American technology and science has to offer,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. He noted that the collaboration represents a "new common sense approach to computing partnerships" and that thanks to the Trump Administration, the U.S. is "bringing new computing capacity online faster than ever before and turning shared innovation into national strength."
For the researchers at Argonne, this represents a transformative capability. “The Equinox and Solstice systems are designed to accelerate a broad set of scientific AI workflows,” said Paul K. Kearns, director of Argonne National Laboratory. He added that the lab is preparing thousands of researchers to leverage these systems, which will also connect directly to leading-edge experimental facilities like the lab’s Advanced Photon Source, allowing scientists to tackle the nation's most pressing challenges.
“At Oracle, we are proud to partner with the Department of Energy to deliver sovereign, high-performance AI capabilities,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “Our collaboration at Argonne, tapping into the power of OCI, will provide a critical resource to address the nation’s most complex challenges and accelerate the next wave of scientific breakthroughs.”
This massive investment in computational infrastructure is designed to secure U.S. leadership in AI for decades to come, forming a foundation for larger-scale collaborations across science, energy, and national security.
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