$1B DOE–AMD partnership builds “Lux” and “Discovery” to accelerate U.S. science and security

The U.S. Department of Energy is putting $1 billion behind two AMD-powered systems—Lux and Discovery—to accelerate research in fusion, cancer, materials, and national security. The move treats sovereign AI/HPC capacity as critical infrastructure, not a discretionary upgrade.

Under a new DOE–AMD partnership, Lux will be deployed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in early 2026, using AMD Instinct MI355X accelerators, EPYC CPUs, and advanced networking co-developed with HPE and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. DOE says Lux will deliver roughly 3× today’s AI capacity at the lab. Discovery follows later in the decade on AMD’s next-gen MI430 class, extending performance and energy efficiency for workloads spanning nuclear power modeling to defense analytics. The combined program is budgeted at $1B across public and private funding.

U.S. labs have leaned heavily on Nvidia-based systems; this deal formalizes a multi-vendor national stack with AMD at the core and ORNL as the hub. DOE frames the effort as a repeatable public-private model for standing up AI “factories” quickly on U.S. soil while diversifying supply across chips, systems, and cloud providers—an industrial policy as much as a technology plan.

Expect near-term capacity from Lux to pull forward AI-driven scientific results, while Discovery sets the runway for larger training and simulation later in the decade. For AMD, this is a marquee government win validating its accelerator roadmap; for the DOE, the $1B bet hardens a sovereign, multi-vendor AI/HPC posture as model sizes and power needs climb.