Georgia Institute of Technology, along with its partners, has received a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to build Nexus, an advanced supercomputer designed to accelerate breakthroughs in areas like medicine, clean energy, climate science, and robotics.
Set to go live in spring 2026, Nexus will be one of the fastest AI-powered supercomputers in the country. It will have the capacity to perform more than 400 quadrillion operations every second. To put this into perspective, it’s the equivalent of every person on Earth doing 50 million calculations each second without stopping.
Georgia Tech’s president Ángel Cabrera said, “Georgia Tech is proud to be one of the nation’s leading sources of AI talent and technologies that are powering a revolution in our economy. It’s fitting we’ve been selected to host this new supercomputer, which will support a new wave of AI-centered innovation across the nation. We’re grateful to the NSF, and we are excited to get to work.”
Supercomputers that are often only accessible to major research hubs, Nexus will be open to researchers from universities and institutions across the country. Georgia Tech will oversee access to the system through an NSF-managed application process, ensuring that even smaller institutions have a chance to work with one of the most powerful AI systems in the world. Ten percent of Nexus’ capacity will be reserved for Georgia Tech’s own campus-based research projects.
Nexus is designed to handle some of the toughest scientific challenges of our time. From finding new drugs to fighting climate change and building smarter robots, the system’s enormous computing power and advanced storage capacity are expected to make discoveries faster than ever before.
Katie Antypas, director of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, explained the system’s unique capabilities. “The Nexus system’s novel approach combining support for persistent scientific services with more traditional high-performance computing will enable new science and AI workflows that will accelerate the time to scientific discovery,” she said. “We look forward to adding Nexus to NSF’s portfolio of advanced computing capabilities for the research community.”
Nexus will house an enormous amount of memory and storage. The system will include 330 terabytes of memory and 10 petabytes of flash storage. That’s enough digital space to hold the same amount of data as 10 billion reams of paper. If you stacked that paper, it would reach a height of about 500,000 kilometers—enough to stretch from Earth to the Moon and back partway again.
But it’s not just about size. Nexus will feature ultra-fast data transfer systems, which means researchers won’t waste time waiting for large datasets to move between systems. This speed is critical for projects that involve complex simulations or massive amounts of data, such as modeling the Earth’s climate or decoding human genetics.
Suresh Marru, principal investigator of the Nexus project and director of Georgia Tech’s new Center for AI in Science and Engineering (ARTISAN), emphasized its importance for researchers everywhere. “This supercomputer will help level the playing field,” he said. “It’s designed to make powerful AI tools easier to use and available to more researchers in more places.”
Nexus is part of a broader national effort to strengthen America’s leadership in artificial intelligence and supercomputing. Georgia Tech is building the system in partnership with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. When Nexus is completed, it will be linked to NCSA’s systems through a new high-speed network, creating a shared infrastructure that allows scientists across the U.S. to collaborate more effectively.
Charles Isbell, chancellor of the University of Illinois and former dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, called it a symbol of teamwork. “Nexus is more than a supercomputer—it’s a symbol of what’s possible when leading institutions work together to advance science,” he said.
This project builds on Georgia Tech’s previous work with its precursor system, HIVE, and the CODA data center where Nexus will be housed. Earlier in 2024, Georgia Tech partnered with Nvidia to deploy an AI supercomputer hub for student use, featuring 20 Nvidia HGX H100 systems and 160 Nvidia H100 Tensor Core GPUs.
Srinivas Aluru, Regents’ Professor and senior associate dean in the College of Computing, described Nexus as the result of years of careful planning. “With Nexus, Georgia Tech joins the league of academic supercomputing centers. This is the culmination of years of planning, including building the state-of-the-art CODA data center and Nexus’ precursor supercomputer project, HIVE,” he said.
