Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Foundation to build a system of 1000 NVIDIA H100 chips for medical research

The Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan Foundation is funding the construction of a powerful computing system for medical research. It will consist of more than 1,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs, which are needed for servers focused on artificial intelligence, writes The Verge.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) makes bold statements about the computing system. The foundation expects it to “lead to revolutionary discoveries that could help cure, prevent, or control all diseases by the end of this century.”

The goal is to provide researchers with access to generative AI to study healthy and diseased cells. Using predictive models of human cells can help scientists better understand how the body reacts to diseases or new drugs.

“AI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient’s body will respond to a new medication,” Chan says in the press release.

The foundation points out that the relevant tools can be very expensive and inaccessible to many scientists. Therefore, CZI intends to change this.

The GPUs will be purchased by the Biohub Network, which is owned by CZI. To develop new artificial intelligence models, the computing system will be trained on existing data sets. It is expected to become one of the largest AI clusters used for non-profit research.