The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is shifting its primary focus toward Biohub and science, emphasizing artificial intelligence to accelerate biomedical discovery and the development of AI-driven virtual cell models to understand human biology and disease.

Biohub plans to double its basic-science funding over the next decade, aiming for about $1 billion in annual operating budget, after already contributing roughly $4 billion since 2016.

The move follows criticism of scaling back DEI and immigration-related funding and signals a longer horizon strategy to fund 10-to-15 year tool development in biology.

The description outlines a high-level restructure and acquisition without delving into specific financial terms, dates, or organizational structures.

Stakeholders expected to benefit include NVIDIA for hardware, CoreWeave for cloud, VAST Data for storage, cloud providers (Google Cloud, AWS, Azure), Meta Platforms, and specialized AI/biotech startups; EvolutionaryScale has been acquired to bolster capabilities.

Open science and large-scale data sharing are central to CZI’s strategy, potentially challenging proprietary AI ecosystems and pushing research toward collaboration and data-centric models.

The restructuring is framed as a long-term bet on AI-enabled research infrastructure with implications for grantmaking, partnerships, and collaboration with academic and industry researchers.

Core technologies include multi-scale, multi-modal virtual cell models like TranscriptFormer and GREmLN, supported by an HPC cluster with over 1,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and a managed Kubernetes environment.

Initial scientific skepticism about such a grand mission is acknowledged, but proponents argue new tools can enable breakthroughs by observing phenomena in novel ways.

The initiative aims to invert traditional workflows by testing hypotheses computationally before lab work, potentially compressing years of research into days and improving discovery success rates.

The move is set against broader cuts in federal science funding and public health investment, underscoring the push toward long-term, high-impact science spanning a decade or more.

This shift mirrors a broader context of reduced public funding and emphasizes long-term, high-impact science projects with horizons of 10 to 15 years.