The Decoder · 10/7/2026, 5:58:20 PM
Biohub Leads $1.8B AI Biology Push with Meta, Google, and US DOE
Biohub, backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a $1.8 billion initiative to build AI models that predict cell behavior for drug development. Key partners including Meta, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and the US Department of Energy are contributing funds and infrastructure, with commercial funders receiving one year of exclusive data access before public release. The first standardized dataset is expected within a year.
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AI models are supposed to learn to predict cell behavior, which could speed up drug development. Biohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a 500 million in April for its five-year "Virtual Biology Initiative." Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs are contributing a combined 500 million in lab measurements and compute over five years. The National Institutes of Health are coordinating datasets built with more than $500 million in prior federal funding, and Biohub will standardize them for AI training.
Commercial funders get one year of exclusive access to the data they paid for before it goes public, according to Biohub research lead Alex Rives. Government-funded work will be available without those restrictions. A first dataset should be ready in about a year.
Other AI companies are also pursuing biology projects. Anthropic has built its own biology lab for AI-driven drug development, and the OpenAI Foundation is putting more than $125 million toward biological and medical datasets.