By Stephen Nellis
BERKELEY, California (Reuters) -The U.S. Department of Energy on Thursday said its “Doudna” due in 2026 will use technology from Nvidia and Dell.
The computer, named for Nobel Prize-winning scientist Jennifer Doudna who made key CRISPR gene-editing discoveries, will be housed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.
At an event at the lab attended by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, officials said that the system will use Nvidia’s latest “Vera Rubin” chips built into liquid-cooled servers by Dell and will be used by 11,000 researchers.
“It will advance scientific discovery, from chemistry to physics to biology,” Wright said at a press conference.
The supercomputers operated by the U.S. Department of Energy help scientists carry out fundamental scientific research. Doudna said her early work on CRISPR relied on support from the Energy Department.
“Today, I think we’re standing at a really interesting moment in biology that really marks the intersection of biology with computing,” Doudna said.
The Energy Department’s supercomputers are also responsible for designing and maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal.
“The scientific supercomputer is one of humanity’s most vital instruments. It is the instrument for advancing knowledge discovery,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said at the event. “It is the foundation of scientific discovery for our country. It is also a foundation for economic and technology leadership. And with that, national security.”
Huang’s remarks came a day after he praised U.S. President Donald Trump while at the same time sharply criticizing export controls on selling Nvidia’s chips to China that have cost Nvidia billions of dollars in lost revenue.
Republican and Democratic senators Jim Banks and Elizabeth Warren sent a letter to Huang on Wednesday raising national security concerns about Nvidia’s plans to open a research and development facility in Shanghai.
On social media platform X, Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, wrote that “keeping advanced AI chips out of the hands of the Chinese Communists isn’t about business, it’s a national security issue. A word of warning to companies like Nvidia, anyone who breaks the law and circumvents export controls will be held accountable.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in Berkeley, California)
