These challenges represent high-impact national priorities where advances in super intelligence, advanced computing, experimentation, and data can dramatically shorten discovery timelines, strengthen U.S. competitiveness, and deliver measurable benefits for the American people.
Helping Americans Live Longer, Healthier Lives
Finding the Root Causes of Chronic Disease
Understanding the environmental and biological origins of chronic disease will enable the healthcare system shift the Nation from disease management to disease prevention.
Accelerating Drug Discovery and Clinical Translation
Creating a scalable national infrastructure that continuously converts biomedical knowledge into actionable therapeutic opportunities can establish the United States as the global leader in SI-enabled translational science.
Unlocking Cures for Pediatric Cancer
This Challenge will accelerate biomarker discovery, target identification, precision medicine, and trial optimization for every child with cancer, while improving survivorship.
Delivering Better Health Outcomes for Veterans
It will enable the VA to recognize changing needs earlier, connect Veterans with appropriate care and support, preserve independence as Veterans age, and reduce the rate of preventable crises and complications from chronic disease.
Building American Industrial Strength
Reenvisioning Advanced Manufacturing and Industrial Productivity
Delivering innovations through an efficient, distributed, and adaptive platform capable of real-time decision making and end-to-end intelligence will profoundly transform how we create chemicals and materials.
Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution
Accelerating SI-driven biotechnology will position the U.S. to establish leadership in the biotechnology revolution by rapidly advancing the continuum from discovery to biomanufacturing.
Securing America's Critical Minerals Supply
This effort will reduce reliance on adversarial nations, expand America's mineral resource base, maximize production profitability, and strengthen supply chain resilience for technologies essential to national security and economic prosperity.
Recentering Microelectronics in America
Microelectronics continues to be at the heart of technological innovation, and every American will benefit from recentering leadership of the industry in the U.S.
Securing U.S. Leadership in Data Centers
By ensuring a robust capacity to develop cutting edge data center technologies and load management strategies, we will solidify U.S. intellectual and economic leadership in SI, driving prosperity and security while maintaining secure, reliable, and affordable energy for consumers.
Delivering Reliable Infrastructure and Energy Affordability
Reimagining the Lifecycle of American Infrastructure
This work will prolong the life and performance of the physical infrastructure that underpins the American economy.
Delivering Nuclear Energy That is Faster, Safer, Cheaper
This challenge will provide Americans more affordable energy while reducing human error, strengthening national security, and directly supporting U.S. energy dominance.
Accelerating Delivery of Fusion Energy
An SI-Fusion Digital Convergence Platform would accelerate delivery of fusion energy as a source of firm, scalable baseload power, strengthening U.S. energy security and competitiveness.
Transforming Nuclear Cleanup and Restoration
This transformation will compress deployment timelines and accelerate nuclear remediation, thereby enabling renewed use of nuclear materials.
Predicting U.S. Water for Energy
Solutions to these long-standing science challenges will radically improve America’s ability to anticipate water supply.
Scaling the Grid to Power the American Economy
This modernization will deliver lower-cost, more reliable power to American homes and businesses while strengthening energy security through faster deployment of grid capabilities and improved resilience against threats.
Unleashing Subsurface Strategic Energy Assets
Understanding subsurface complexities and stored energy sources is key to securing the nation’s energy future and will reduce the costs of recovery for oil, gas, and heat, reduce costs of power to U.S. consumers, re-shore manufacturing, and enhance U.S. competitiveness.
Extending the Frontiers of American Discovery
Discovering Quantum Algorithms with AI
This technological leap would not only bolster the nation’s economy and security but also provide tools to address some of the most challenging scientific and societal problems.
Realizing Quantum Systems for Discovery and Use
The SI enabled understanding and control of complex quantum systems will accelerate the deployment of quantum technologies and accelerate their utilization for currently intractable challenges in scientific discovery and technology development.
Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories
This capability will speed up the development of novel materials and molecules for energy, next-generation computing, national security, and biotechnology.
A predictive foundation drives the bioeconomy’s flywheel by accelerating every step of discovery.
Designing Materials with Predictable Functionality
Tight integration of SI into the materials discovery-to-product workflow could significantly reduce time to market in manufacturing—from many years to decades down to months to a few years.
Enhancing Particle Accelerators for Discovery
Integrating SI into accelerator design and optimization will increase the pace of future breakthroughs, enabling a deeper understanding of the universe, the development of new energy and computing technologies, and the creation of new techniques for the diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Unifying Physics from Quarks to the Cosmos
The acceleration of discovery, particularly in areas involving vast datasets from cutting-edge experiments, means we could reach breakthroughs much faster than previously possible, impacting our technological capabilities and quality of life in unforeseen ways.
Mining Decades of Space Mission Data for Discovery
Turning America’s mission archives into engines of discovery multiplies the return on every dollar the United States has ever spent in space.
Protecting the Nation from Emerging Threats
Early Detection and Attribution of Biological Threats
These capabilities protect Americans by deterring adversaries and shielding the bioeconomy from misuse.
Accelerating Design of Weapon Components and Systems
By extracting greater capability from existing modeling, simulation, and test investments, the United States will sustain a decisive advantage in the pace of weapons innovation.
Accelerating Materials Discovery, Production, and Qualification for Strategic Deterrence
Accelerating material development and certification for new materials and processes will ensure the rapid delivery of strategic components for deterrence.
Accelerating Nuclear Threat Assessment, Preparedness, and Response
The initiative will shrink detection-to-response times from days to hours, enhance public safety and national security, and improve decision confidence while reducing false alarms through clear, quantified risk assessments.
Strengthening Deterrence Through Attribution of Nuclear Signatures
This initiative will significantly enhance national security and emergency response by accelerating threat assessment processes and shrinking the timeline from material collection to attribution.
Detecting, Locating, Identifying, and Characterizing Proliferation Threats
The outcomes of this initiative will significantly enhance U.S. national security, deterrence, and global nonproliferation efforts by accelerating threat detection and decision cycles.
Accelerating Experimental, Design, Production, and Nuclear Deterrence Outcomes
By transforming experimental campaign knowledge into better deterrence outcomes, NNSA can modernize at the pace of evolving threats and shift the strategic calculus of peer adversaries.
Software Understanding for National Security
Accelerating software understanding will enhance cybersecurity of American critical infrastructure, speed the development and qualification of software systems for secure and high-consequence environments, and promote higher-quality software development.
Ensuring American Space Superiority
The nation that can best see, predict, operate within, and sustain systems within the space environment will achieve an unmatched freedom of action.
This was last updated .