The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative committed over $20 million in new grants and strategic investments to accelerate AI-powered biomedical research, alongside the launch of landmark in-kind resources.
Major initiatives include the Billion Cells Project—an unprecedented effort to generate a dataset of one billion cells for training next-generation AI models in biology—developed with partners 10x Genomics, Ultima Genomics, and Scale Bio.
CZI also awarded a $1.5 million grant to Global Genes to integrate AI into the RARE-X patient data platform for rare disease research, and provided $14 million in multi-year grants to four research collaboratives developing new tools to analyze cells and biomolecules.
Additionally, CZI made a strategic program investment in Citizen Health, an AI-powered platform for rare disease patients, and made available one of the world’s largest nonprofit GPU superclusters to academic researchers, supporting large-scale AI model building in life sciences through in-kind allocations rather than cash awards
