NSF AI grant $10M: "Expanse 2," a national shared supercomputer serving the long tail of science and AI (UC San Diego)

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) awarded about $10 million ($10,000,000) for "Expanse 2," a next-generation supercomputer at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), UC San Diego (NSF Award 2614012; program: Innovative HPC; June 2026–May 2028).

Per the abstract, Expanse 2 is a multi-petaflop/s system that combines the latest-generation processors and accelerators (e.g., GPUs) with an advanced Ethernet-based interconnect to support data-intensive workloads. It responds to national R&D priorities with the stated goal of enhancing national competitiveness. The abstract lists supported research areas including electronic chip design automation (EDA), AI-accelerated drug discovery, AI applied to digital agriculture, the study of instabilities and turbulence in fusion, and open inference models.

As the name suggests, this is the successor to the existing shared supercomputer "Expanse." The title's phrase — "continuing to serve the long tail of science and AI innovation" — captures the design philosophy: delivering computing not only to a few giant projects but to the many modest-scale yet numerous research efforts that make up the "long tail."

Why it matters: high-performance computing (HPC) is often assumed to be the preserve of a few very large projects, but Expanse 2 emphasizes the long tail — providing access to the many researchers and institutions that cannot field large machines on their own. As AI's compute demand surges, a nation maintaining shared supercomputing as a public good and opening it across fields — drug discovery, agriculture, chip design, fusion — helps close gaps in access to compute. Like other NSF awards this site covers (the National Data Platform, the cross-disciplinary data fabric MESA), it is an example of building national research infrastructure to accelerate science with AI.