DOE readies multibillion-dollar AI push

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is planning a major initiative to use artificial intelligence to speed up scientific discoveries. At a meeting here last week, DOE officials said they will likely ask Congress for between $3 billion and $4 billion over 10 years, roughly the amount the agency is spending to build next-generation "exascale" supercomputers. But DOE has a unique asset: torrents of data. Algorithms trained with these data could help discover new materials or rare signals of new particles in the deluge of high energy physics data. But they face intense global competition to fund researchers and companies to lead what could be the next phase of the digital revolution.