Google is investing $20 million in cash and $2 million in cloud credits into a new funding initiative that will empower scientists and researchers to find the next big scientific discoveries using artificial intelligence.

The announcement, made today by Google DeepMind co-founder and CEO Demis Hassabis during a fireside chat at the closed-door AI for Science Forum in London, feeds into a broader push by Big Tech to curry favor with young innovators and startups, a strategy that has included acqui-hires, equity investments, and cloud partnerships — some of which has attracted the attentions of regulators.

This latest announcement, via Google's 19-year-old philanthropic arm Google.org, differs in that it centers on non-equity funding for academic and non-for-profit institutions globally. Similar to other Big Tech funding and partnership initiatives, however, this will go some way toward helping Google ingratiate itself with some of the leading scientific minds, through direct cash injections and by providing infrastructure to power their projects. In turn, this positions Google well to acquire future customers — particularly those who are currently on the cusp of doing great things, working on projects that require significant AI tooling and compute, which Google can provide.

Google is far from alone in this strategy — just last week, for example, Amazon's cloud leader AWS said it would commit $110 million in grants and credits to poach AI researchers into its own fold. Elsewhere, Google itself has pledged other similar initiatives of late in the AI space, including a $20 million fund to support think tanks and academic institutions building out their AI capabilities, and a similar-size fund to run a generative AI accelerator program for nonprofits.

Solving hard problems
The one thing successful applicants will have in common is that they will be using "AI to solve increasingly complex problems at the intersections of different disciplines of science," according to an accompanying blog post by Maggie Johnson, Google VP and global head of Google.org,
"Fields such as rare and neglected disease research, experimental biology, materials science and sustainability all show promise," Johnson wrote.

In response to some follow-up questions by TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson said that they don't have any set target in terms of how many projects they're looking to finance. However, they emphasized that they want the funding to be "significant enough to fuel scientific breakthroughs" — that is not what is looking to pepper small pockets of cash far and wide. Instead, it will be distributed throughout no more than approximately 15 organizations, with proposals to decide on the recipients and distribute the funds by 2026.

It's been a major year, however for Google's AI unit DeepMind itself. One of the three founders of DeepMind, Hassabis, was knighted for services to AI back in March. But it was then in October that Hassabis and DeepMind director John Jumper ( pictured together above)  scooped one half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, which has helped accelerate research around drug discovery, diagnosing diseases, and bioengineering.

This newest fund essentially seeks to build off that momentum.

"I believe artificial intelligence will help scientists and researchers achieve some of the greatest breakthroughs of our time," Hassabis said in a stock statement issued to TechCrunch. "We hope the launch of our $20 million fund will help encourage further collaboration between the private and public sectors, kick-start renewed excitement for the power of AI and science, and inspire others to join us in funding this important work."