Funding Opportunity Available for Empire AI Projects
New York State’s Empire AI consortium is accelerating the state’s leadership in AI-powered research. As part of its ongoing support for the effort, the Simons Foundation has announced a new funding opportunity that will provide $6 million in total funding for ambitious two-year research programs.
Launched in 2024, Empire AI is a consortium of public and private research institutions based in New York State working together to advance the development of AI and AI-supported technology that can serve the public good. The Simons Foundation is a significant contributor to the consortium, providing $75 million to support the participation of the City University of New York and the foundation’s in-house computational research division, the Flatiron Institute.
This new request for applications (RFA), called “Utilizing the Full Power of Empire AI,” seeks to support cutting-edge mathematics and basic science research that draws on the advanced computational power of Empire AI. A successful proposal will outline an ambitious two-year research program in or across the following fields: computational astrophysics and physics; computational biology; mathematics; neuroscience; and computational physical chemistry.
Each proposal will necessarily rely on the development and use of foundational machine learning models to solve problems of fundamental importance in the above-listed disciplines. All proposals should detail how their work will use Empire AI’s multinode GPU clusters.
The RFA is open to any researcher holding a tenure-track or tenured faculty position at any of Empire AI’s member institutions (the City University of New York, Cornell University, Columbia University, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Rochester Institute of Technology, the State University of New York and the University of Rochester). Employees of the Flatiron Institute can participate as unfunded collaborators. Additional PIs on a proposal can be employed by institutions outside the Empire AI consortium through a subcontract. Subcontract institutions may be from U.S. and non-U.S. nonprofit organizations; public and private institutions, such as colleges, universities, hospitals, laboratories, institutes, and units of state and local government; and eligible agencies of the federal government. There are no citizenship requirements.
The deadline for submitting applications is December 1, 2026, at noon Eastern time. Further details on the funding opportunity and the application process can be found on the RFA page.
