- NVIDIA, Meta, Samsung, Hyundai Motor Group, Henkel, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron and Lam Research among more than 45 founding members
- AI Materials Foundry brings together compute, data, labs and intelligence for the first time, with regional hubs in the United States, Europe and APAC
- Focus areas include semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing
CuspAI today announced the launch of the AI Materials Foundry, bringing together a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise for the design of new materials, orchestrated by a single agentic platform.
Over 45 organizations join as founding members, including NVIDIA, who will provide the compute infrastructure, and Meta's Fundamental AI Research Team, who develop the Universal Model for Atoms (UMA), a frontier atomistic chemistry model for materials science.
CuspAI's proprietary AI platform, MIRA, sits at the heart of the network, enabling partners to run full discovery cycles from generative materials design through simulation, synthesis route planning, and coordinated experimental validation. The platform is underpinned by the largest curated experimental materials datasets in the world.
The collaboration seeks to end the materials bottleneck constraining progress. Semiconductors, clean energy and advanced manufacturing are among the industries facing the same challenge: while the engineering needed for innovation is well understood, the constraint is materials.
"If we don't make progress fast, the next 50 years of industrial progress will be constrained by a single challenge: the world needs materials that don't yet exist. That's what we're on a mission to solve combining frontier agentic AI with deep domain expertise, exclusive data access and close customer partnerships. We're delighted to be joined by more than 45 leaders in their fields to advance materials discovery."
- Dr Chad Edwards, CEO and Co-Founder, CuspAI
"As AI transforms the physical world, new materials will open up new frontiers across semiconductors, energy and advanced manufacturing. The AI Materials Foundry brings NVIDIA accelerated computing infrastructure together with world-class chemistry and materials expertise to help power the next generation of materials discovery."
- Ian Buck, Vice President of Hyperscale and HPC, NVIDIA
"We're proud to be longstanding partners with CuspAI and now as founding members of the AI Materials Foundry ecosystem. Our open source frontier models for materials science research will enable more teams to tackle previously intractable challenges, more precisely and more quickly than before."
- Rob Fergus, Vice President, AI Research and Head of FAIR, Meta
Unlocking AI-powered materials discovery
Software-led materials discovery requires four things: high quality training data at scale, to make AI predictions reliable; compute powerful enough to screen at molecular resolution across billions of candidates; synthesis infrastructure to move from digital design to physical reality; and domain expertise to interpret what the machine finds and know what to do with it.
CuspAI's AI Materials Foundry assembles all four, for the first time, providing the production infrastructure for industrial materials discovery. Rather than relying on the physical constraints of a single, isolated laboratory, CuspAI's ecosystem approach creates a compounding intelligence loop: breakthroughs achieved within the network have potential to accelerate discovery timelines across the entire global value chain.
CuspAI brings a track record for accelerating discovery. With a single customer, Finnish chemicals company Kemira, CuspAI was able to screen a search space of 300 trillion potential molecular structures, delivering twenty validated novel candidates for further testing and validation. This process previously took the customer years, while CuspAI's programme was achieved in six months.
One Foundry project already underway is a new multi-year partnership between CuspAI and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore's lead public sector R&D agency. The collaboration will combine AI-driven discovery with autonomous synthesis capability across semiconductors, carbon capture and advanced electronics.
Private, protected, partner-led agentic design
Through the Foundry programme, members will get to learn about state of the art methods in AI for Science and agentic materials discovery, including how to deploy CuspAI's discovery platform and autonomous scientific agent, MIRA, within their existing R&D infrastructure.
A partner defines what they need: a compound with specific thermal stability, a semiconductor with a target bandgap, a catalyst with a defined reaction profile, a polymer meeting a set cost threshold and MIRA generates candidate structures using generative models trained on the world's most comprehensive experimental dataset. Capable of running property prediction at scale across millions of candidates, MIRA selects the most promising, designs synthesis routes matched to the available lab infrastructure in the network, and routes the work to the right facility based on capability, geography and throughput. It tracks outcomes, feeds results back into the model, and sharpens its predictions with every cycle.
Partner data is protected in private Foundry instances. The platform is designed for industrial confidentiality at the scale of multinational and government operations.
At the simulation layer, the Foundry runs on kUPS: an open source molecular simulation toolkit built by CuspAI in collaboration with the NVIDIA ALCHEMI (AI Lab for Chemistry and Materials Innovation) team and will leverage Meta's UMA, which enables fast, accurate simulation of atomic interactions across the periodic table. kUPS is integrating with ALCHEMI, enabling a continuous pipeline from candidate generation to physical property prediction at GPU scale.
CuspAI's team, and scientific architecture, were built to solve the material discovery problem. CuspAI CTO and co-founder, Professor Max Welling, co-invented the variational autoencoder (VAE) and the equivariant neural network architectures that now underpin generative molecular design. Chief Scientific Officer, Professor Aron Walsh FRS, is one of the world's foremost computational materials scientists. John Giannandrea, who built and led AI research at Google before serving as Apple's SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, will help set up US foundry operations.
The quality of any AI system for materials discovery is determined almost entirely by the calibre of the data it was trained on. CuspAI has secured exclusive AI training rights to the datasets that make up the foundational experimental records of materials science including the Cambridge Structural Database via CCDC and the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database via FIZ Karlsruhe. It also has licensed access to materials science content from Wiley and other leading publishers of scientific journals. This dataset is paired with frontier atomistic chemistry models from Meta and compounded by every validated experimental result returned through Foundry programmes, ensuring the data advantage widens with each programme completed.
FOUNDING PARTNERS
- 3M
- AMD
- Applied Materials
- ASMPT
- Caelux
- Fujifilm
- The Goodyear Tire Rubber Company
- Henkel
- Hitachi High-Tech
- Hyundai Motor Group
- Johnson Matthey
- JSR Corporation
- Kemira
- Kioxia
- Lam Research
- LG CNS
- Merck
- Meta
- Mitsui Chemicals
- NVIDIA
- Oxford PV
- Qnity Electronics, Inc
- Resonac
- Samsung
- Shimadzu
- SoftBank Corp.
- Tokyo Electron (TEL)
- Topsoe
- Umicore
- Universal Display Corporation (UDC)
- VisionPower Semiconductor Manufacturing Company
LAB NETWORK
- A*STAR
- AMOLF
- ATLANT 3D
- Avantium
- Big Chemistry
- Cambridge University
- Dutch Institute for Fundamental Energy Research (DIFFER)
- Eindhoven University of Technology
- Henry Royce Institute
- hte the high throughput experimentation company
- IMEC
- Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
- Tyndall National Institute
- University of Amsterdam
- VSParticle
DATA PARTNERS
- CCDC
- ICSD and FIZ Karlsruhe
- Wiley
ABOUT CUSPAI
CuspAI was founded in 2024 by Dr. Chad Edwards and Prof. Max Welling to build the AI system for materials discovery. Through its 'AI Materials Foundry' a global network of over 45 partners, including NVIDIA and Meta the company is accelerating breakthrough discoveries in semiconductors, energy, and climate. CuspAI has raised over $650M from investors including Kleiner Perkins, NEA, Temasek, NVentures, Bezos Expeditions, Samsung, and Hyundai Motor Group. Headquartered in Cambridge, UK, the company operates globally across London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Tokyo, Singapore, and the United States. Its advisory board includes Nobel laureate, Geoffrey Hinton; former President and CTO of ASML, Martin van den Brink; and AMD Board Member Chairman of Lam Research, Abhi Talwalkar.
www.cusp.ai
Quotes from our partners
Heung-Soo Kim, Executive Vice President and Head of Global Strategy Office, Hyundai Motor Group:
"Hyundai Motor Group has been working closely with CuspAI to solve fundamental materials science challenges using AI for Science. As a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry, we are excited to help accelerate breakthroughs in materials innovation and reinforce our global leadership in sustainable next-generation mobility."
Sumie Segawa, Vice President General Manager, Corporate Innovation Division, Tokyo Electron:
"We believe that the AI Materials Foundry concept could disrupt the current business model in the industry, and we are pleased to have an opportunity to collaborate with them."
Yu Cao, Chief AI Officer, Applied Materials:
"By combining CuspAI's AI capabilities with Applied Materials' deep expertise in semiconductor process technology, we look forward to dramatically compressing the time it takes to move from concept to viable new materials and unlocking innovation that benefits our customers and the semiconductor industry."
Toshihiko Omote, Chief Technology Officer, Mitsui Chemicals:
"As a founding member, Mitsui Chemicals' expectation of this initiative goes beyond participation in an advanced AI platform we see it as an opportunity to structurally strengthen our competitive advantage. We expect that AI-driven materials discovery will significantly enhance the speed of R&D as well as the success rate of new business creation, delivering tangible business value. Through collaboration with CuspAI, NVIDIA, and Meta, we are committed to internalizing cutting-edge technologies and translating these insights into strengthened competitiveness for Mitsui Chemicals."
Yoshiaki Shimada, Acting Director, Quantum Information Technology Department, Product Research Development Division, Technology Unit, SoftBank Corp. :
"We believe that Physical AI and AI for Science will be key to solving society's most pressing challenges. Advances in materials innovation are essential for breakthroughs in energy, sustainability, next-generation computing, and life sciences. We are excited to join the AI Materials Foundry and help accelerate discovery through the convergence of AI, data, compute, and scientific expertise."
Andreas Schwartz, CEO, ICSD:
"A solid data foundation is crucial for the application of AI in materials research. We are very proud to be able to deliver exactly that with ICSD, a high-quality product in this field."
Yoji Ito, Director, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, FUJIFILM Corporation:
"Fujifilm is pleased to join the AI Materials Foundry initiative as a founding member. We believe that advanced AI technologies developed by CuspAI can further accelerate the development of next-generation materials and help address complex industrial challenges. We look forward to contributing to the shaping of a new model for innovation in materials R&D."
Hideshi Miyajima, Chief Technology Officer, KIOXIA:
"We hope this initiative will serve as a great gift to the further advancement of semiconductors, by opening new possibilities in semiconductor memory materials."
Katsuhisa Yoshida, Head of Research Center for Computational Science and Informatics, Resonac:
"Resonac is pleased to join the AI Materials Foundry as a founding member. We believe AI has the potential to transform how advanced materials are discovered and developed. By engaging with leading global innovators and bringing our materials perspective to this initiative, we look forward to exploring how emerging AI capabilities can help accelerate the creation of sustainable, high-performance materials."
Michael Nolan, Head of Group, Materials Modelling for Devices and CMOS++ Research Cluster Lead, Tyndall National Institute:
"Joining the AI Materials Foundry is an exciting opportunity to be at the forefront of materials discovery through bringing together scientific expertise, talent, data, computing and AI, to deliver real-world solutions to pressing global challenges."
Ed Crossland, Chief Technology Officer, Oxford PV:
"At Oxford PV, materials innovation is at the heart of our mission to deliver the next generation of high-performance solar technology. We believe AI-driven materials discovery can significantly accelerate the path from scientific insight to commercial impact. Through the AI Materials Foundry, we look forward to contributing our expertise in advanced photovoltaic materials and collaborating with a world-class network of partners to accelerate innovation in clean energy."
Patrick Vandenameele, CEO, imec:
"Materials innovation sits at the heart of every semiconductor roadmap, and AI is fundamentally changing what's possible. Joining the AI Materials Foundry initiative of CuspAI is a strong strategic fit for imec. As a world-leading semiconductor R&D centre with deep expertise in both materials and AI, from algorithms to hardware-software co-design, we can contribute both our experimental infrastructure and our compute know-how. We're excited to help accelerate the discoveries that will shape the next generation of chips, energy systems and sustainable technologies."
Beh Kian Teik, Chief Executive Officer, Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR):
"AI is transforming how materials research is done, letting scientists explore, test and translate new materials faster than ever before. Combining AI, data and deep scientific expertise can accelerate innovation in areas critical to Singapore's future competitiveness, from semiconductors to advanced manufacturing. A*STAR is pleased to partner with CuspAI to turn frontier materials science into real-world impact."
Sampo Lahtinen, Executive Vice President Research and Innovation, Kemira:
"Our collaboration with CuspAI has shown the real impact AI can have on materials discovery screening vast molecular spaces and delivering viable candidates in a fraction of the time. As a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry, Kemira is excited to build on this momentum to accelerate innovation and develop more sustainable materials solutions for water-intensive industries."
Armughan Rafat, Senior Vice President and Chief AI and Data Analytics Officer, Wiley:
"The next frontier of AI will be defined by the quality of the knowledge that fuels it. CuspAI's AI Materials Foundry is a compelling demonstration of what becomes possible when frontier AI infrastructure meets authoritative, trusted scientific content. We're proud to see Wiley's peer-reviewed literature serve as a foundational layer for breakthroughs that could reshape how the world discovers and develops materials."
David Fried, Chief AI Officer, Lam Research:
"Materials innovation has become a critical driver of the next wave of AI, and advancing it requires collaboration across the ecosystem-from discovery through manufacturing. By pairing AI-driven discovery with deep process expertise, Lam helps bridge the gap between breakthrough science and real-world semiconductor solutions, empowering our customers to bring the next generation of innovations into existence."
Julie Brown, Executive Vice President and Chief Technical Officer, Universal Display Corporation:
"UDC is pleased to be a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry. AI and machine learning have become increasingly important tools across the material innovation lifecycle, from discovery and development to process optimization. By combining deep chemistry expertise, decades of leadership in OLEDs, and advanced computational approaches, we believe initiatives like this can help uncover new opportunities across the broader field of organic electronics and accelerate the development of next-generation technologies that deliver unique performance, efficiency, and sustainability benefits."
Randy King, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Qnity:
"The pace of innovation in advanced electronics is closely tied to how quickly new materials can be discovered, developed, and commercialized. We are pleased to join the AI Materials Foundry and collaborate with leaders across materials science, semiconductor manufacturing, and AI to accelerate innovation and help enable the breakthroughs that will shape the future of electronics."
Mike Kesti, Senior Vice President of R&D, 3M Corporate Research Lab:
"3M has a long history of turning material science into real-world solutions. As a founding member of the AI Materials Foundry, we aim to accelerate how new materials are discovered and scaled bringing together AI, data, advanced manufacturing, and global expertise to unlock the next wave of innovation."
Suzanna Ward, Executive Director, the CCDC:
"For over six decades, the CCDC has supported scientific discovery through trusted structural chemistry data, scientific insight and expertise. High-quality scientific data is essential for the effective application of AI in materials research, and we are pleased to be a data partner in CuspAI's AI Materials Foundries initiative. By bringing together data, computation and experimentation, the initiative has the potential to catalyse the discovery and development of new materials."
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260716196996/en/
Contacts:
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