US government, Google join Zuckerberg-backed Biohub in $1.8 billion push for AI biology data

The US government, Meta Platforms, and Google have joined forces with a nonprofit organization called Biohub to create open datasets for AI models in biological research. This partnership has resulted in a total investment of $1.8 billion. Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs are contributing $300 million to the project, while the Department of Energy will provide over $500 million in laboratory resources over five years.

The National Institutes of Health will coordinate datasets and repositories with more than $500 million in earlier federal funding, which Biohub will standardize for AI training. The investments aim to develop predictive models that could significantly reduce drug development timelines, which currently take years. Biohub, founded by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan, has already invested $500 million in the project.

The datasets will eventually be made publicly available, but companies that fund them will have a head start due to embargo periods. This approach allows private money to support an open science initiative. Current cell datasets consist of hundreds of millions of cells, while Biohub aims to generate billions and eventually trillions of data points to create an accurate predictive model.