By Noelle Harff
Publication Date: 2026-11-05 19:13:00
San Diego-based Scripps Research was recently awarded 14 million computing hours, which will supercharge the speed of foundational research for vaccines, antibody therapies and small molecule drug discovery.
This state-of-the-art computing power comes from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation, the personal philanthropy of NVIDIA’s co-founder and his wife. This gift is equivalent to tens of millions of dollars, according to some estimates.
But the gift wasn’t made purely out of generosity. Scripps’s trove of deep scientific data may be worth equal, if not more, to its AI partners.
The multi-trillion-dollar pitch to Wall Street by AI behemoth Anthropic leans on the biological discoveries and new treatments its models could one day produce. But without good data, the models can’t make those discoveries, and NVIDIA can’t sell more chips.
The Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation’s grant solves both problems at once. With Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, and 14 million hours of free computing power, Scripps can speed up the science it was already doing.
But what if one of Scripps’ competitors uses Anthropic’s models, allowing the San Diego institution’s intellectual property to be accessed by anyone with model access?
“We want to maximize impact for exploration and discovery,” said Andrew Ward, a professor at Scripps Research who is leading the project. “We need credit, of course, but it’s not exactly what we’re chasing,” he said. Ward is more…
