29 NSF National AI Research Institutes funded at ~$20M each over 5 years

NSF's National AI Research Institutes program has funded 29 institutes across more than 500 collaborating institutions in the United States and internationally, with each institute funded at approximately $20 million over five years. Lead agencies are NSF and USDA-NIFA, with co-funding from DOD, NIST, ED-IES, and other partners. The FY2025 NITRD Supplement Appendix B documents a $72.3 million FY2025 budget for the AI Institutes program.

The program's solicitation (NSF 23-610) requires institutes to develop shared community infrastructure for data and software supporting reproducibility, and intellectual-property and data-sharing terms apply across NSF and partner-agency funding contributions.

For C-0038 and C-0039: the AI Institutes program is the most direct evidence that federal AI funding is now contingent on data-governance and reproducibility infrastructure. Institutions whose data infrastructure cannot demonstrably meet the reproducibility requirement are competing at a disadvantage for the program's $20M-per-institute awards. Tier 3 deployment closes the gap between solicitation language and institutional capability.