Biohub, Meta, Google DeepMind and US agencies pool $1.8B for open AI biology data
Biohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a roughly $1.8 billion effort to build open biology datasets for training AI models that predict cell behavior. Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs are contributing $300 million combined, the US Department of Energy is putting in more than $500 million over five years for measurement, modelling and compute, and the NIH is supplying datasets built with over $500 million in earlier federal funding. Biohub says commercial funders get one year of exclusive access before the data goes public, government-funded work carries no such restriction, and a first dataset is expected in about a year, with accurate predictive models targeted within five years.
Open, high-quality data is a key bottleneck for predictive biology models, so this government-industry coalition could speed progress toward virtual cells and faster drug discovery.