The National Science Foundation is the US federal agency funding basic research and education across the non-medical sciences. Its role in AI policy is that of a funder and infrastructure provider: it does not regulate AI systems and is not primarily an AI deployer, but it shapes which researchers can obtain the compute needed to work on frontier-scale problems.
State and Regional AI Infrastructure Hubs (2026)
NSF announced the State and Regional Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Hubs program, solicitation NSF 26-513, reported August 6, 2026. The solicitation describes a $100 million initiative to widen access to compute capacity among researchers and students. An initial round of proposals is due in November 2026, and NSF states it intends to support a first tranche of 10 hubs (Source: insideaipolicy.com).
The program addresses the academic side of the compute-access gap set out at Compute Governance, where the resources required for frontier-scale work sit overwhelmingly with private firms. At $100 million across a planned ten hubs, the program is small relative to the private capital expenditure tracked at AI Infrastructure Capex, and its effect is on the distribution of access among researchers rather than on aggregate national capacity.
The record on this program rests on a single paywalled report, and the solicitation's eligibility criteria, hub selection process and award sizes are not established here.
Relationships
- related: Compute Governance — the compute-access distribution the hubs program addresses
- related: AI Infrastructure Capex — the private buildout against which the program's scale is measured
- related: National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), NIST CAISI (Center for AI Standards and Innovation) — the other Commerce-side federal technical bodies in AI