The US Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta are joining Biohub’s Virtual Biology Initiative, bringing the effort to $1.8 billion in funding, data, computing and measurement technology, Biohub said Wednesday. The goal is open, AI-ready biological data to train models that predict how cells behave, building toward what Biohub calls a “universal virtual cell,” Axios reported.
DOE will invest more than $500 million over five years in lab measurement, modeling and computation, according to Biohub’s announcement. Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta are collectively investing $300 million. Biohub’s founding $500 million commitment, announced in April, anchors the effort. NIH’s share is existing data rather than new money: it will coordinate datasets and repositories built through more than $500 million in prior federal investment, which Biohub will standardize for AI training. The commitments that are new on Wednesday, from DOE and the three tech partners, come to more than $800 million.
Biohub is a philanthropic venture of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, Reuters reported. The data will eventually be public, but commercial funders get a head start. “With commercial funders we have embargo periods where there’s a period of time where the groups can work on the data, and then it becomes available as a public scientific resource,” Biohub head of science Alex Rives told Reuters. Axios reported the embargo lasts one year.
Rives told Reuters the government-funded work will carry no such restrictions and that Biohub plans to approach pharmaceutical companies and philanthropies next. Current cell datasets run to hundreds of millions of cells, he said, while an accurate predictive model will need billions and eventually trillions. The partners aim to compress decades of work into five years, with a first dataset ready in about a year.
Nvidia will support the initiative with computing infrastructure and software, Biohub said, and groups including the Broad Institute, the Allen Institute and the Wellcome Sanger Institute will help organize the research community. The push adds to a broader AI-lab move into biology. Reuters noted that Anthropic has expanded its biology work with a wet lab, while the OpenAI Foundation started a grant program of more than $125 million for biological and medical datasets.
Sources
- Biohub via PR Newswire: International, cross-sector collaboration commits nearly $2 billion to build foundational data for AI models to predict and treat disease (October 7, 2026)
- Reuters via CNA: US government, Google join Zuckerberg-backed Biohub in $1.8 billion push for AI biology data (October 7, 2026)
- Axios: Zuckerberg teams with Google, U.S. in push to map cells (October 7, 2026)