Stanford University and SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory will lead six federally funded AI research projects spanning battery recycling, storm forecasting, and plant genetics, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Wednesday, July 22, at the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, D.C.
The awards give Palo Alto-area institutions a significant stake in a $250 million first phase of funding, according to the DOE, which selected 278 projects from more than 5,000 applications nationwide. Stanford and SLAC researchers will also serve as partners on 11 additional projects, giving the two institutions a hand in 17 Genesis Mission efforts total.
"Key discoveries made here at Stanford underpin modern artificial intelligence," David Studdert, Stanford's vice provost and dean of research, said in the university's announcement. "Thanks to the Genesis Mission's ambitious agenda, research teams here can continue to contribute to how this technology is refined and deployed to advance science."
What the projects do
The six Stanford- and SLAC-led projects:
- Battery recycling: Associate scientist Ahamed Irshad Maniyanganam at the SLAC-Stanford Battery Center will lead a nine-month effort to use AI to recover cobalt, nickel, and manganese from spent lithium-ion batteries at 80% purity or better.
- Storm forecasting: Da Yang, an assistant professor at Stanford's Doerr School of Sustainability, will use generative AI to extend atmospheric river forecasts from days to weeks, a project with direct implications for California flood and power-outage risk.
- Plant genetics: Bioengineering assistant professor Jennifer Brophy will build an AI foundation model for plant gene regulation, using sorghum as a test crop, and release it openly through the DOE's capability catalog.
- Neutrino physics: Mechanical engineering professor Eric Darve will lead a system called ORACLE to analyze data from the international DUNE experiment investigating matter-antimatter imbalance.
- Geothermal energy: Hamdi Tchelepi, the Max Steineke Professor at the Doerr School of Sustainability, aims to compress underground rock-fracture analyses from months into near-real-time guidance for geothermal development.
- Semiconductor materials: Materials science assistant professor Felipe Jornada will model electron behavior in conductors only a few atoms wide, relevant to next-generation chip technology.
Bigger federal picture
The Genesis Mission, created by executive order in November 2025, has expanded beyond the DOE to include 20 federal agencies with a combined commitment exceeding $5 billion, according to FedScoop. The Department of Defense alone plans to commit more than $200 million in fiscal 2026 and over $1.3 billion in fiscal 2027. Private-sector consortium members include Nvidia, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, IBM, AMD, and Google.
The DOE has indicated a second phase of awards will follow in fall 2026. The only Phase 2 project announced so far is a $60 million, three-year nuclear energy effort led by Idaho National Laboratory.
Local context
The awards arrive during a period of federal funding uncertainty for research universities. The White House acknowledged in July 2026 court filings that it used keyword searches to terminate more than 1,000 research grants at the University of California worth nearly $2 billion. Stanford president emeritus John Hennessy warned separately that undercutting research universities would mean forfeiting technological leadership to China.
Individual project funding amounts for the Stanford and SLAC awards have not been disclosed.
