Great Sky Selected for DOE’s Genesis Mission

BOULDER, Colo. — Great Sky, an AI hardware company building superconducting optoelectronic neural networks, has been selected to participate in Phase I of the Genesis Mission, a Department of Energy initiative to accelerate breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security. Great Sky's project, developed in partnership with Brookhaven National Laboratory, will advance highly connected superconducting optoelectronic neuromorphic systems for scalable AI, addressing Genesis Mission Challenge Area 9, Recentering Microelectronics in America.

The Genesis Mission is a historic national initiative led by the U.S. Department of Energy, which is building the world's most powerful integrated science discovery platform. By uniting government, industry like Great Sky, academia, and philanthropy, it is accelerating breakthroughs in energy, scientific discovery, and national security through a new platform that combines AI, supercomputing, quantum systems, and advanced scientific instruments.

The goal of the Phase I RFA awards is to identify promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establish a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.

Great Sky's project addresses a core challenge facing DOE's scientific mission: processing streaming data from world-class experimental facilities including synchrotrons, particle colliders, and fusion reactors in real time, at a scale conventional AI hardware struggles to support. Great Sky's superconducting optoelectronic networks (SOENs) combine superconducting Josephson junction circuits, which offer the highest speed-to-energy ratio of any known circuit element, with integrated photonic waveguides for long-range, single-photon optical communication. This approach reduces communication energy by three orders of magnitude relative to conventional architectures and can sustain high-speed synaptic event rates at any network scale, a regime that is inaccessible to today's shared-router computing architectures.

Great Sky's chips are manufacturable using mature, widely available lithography, supporting domestic production without reliance on the most advanced foreign fabrication tools. Over the past 15 months, Great Sky has completed four chip tapeouts for under $4 million, demonstrating a rapid, low-cost fabrication capability.

Over the nine-month project, Great Sky and Brookhaven National Laboratory will scale Great Sky's superconducting neural networks toward real-time fusion disruption prediction using diagnostic data from the DIII-D tokamak, advance on-chip photonic distribution to support significantly larger networks, demonstrate chip-to-chip optical communication as a building block for multi-chip and wafer-scale systems, and develop an AI-driven co-design workflow, built in partnership with Brookhaven, that automates key aspects of neuromorphic chip architecture. Together, these efforts lay a scaling road map toward trillion-parameter, multi-wafer AI systems built specifically for DOE science.

"Being selected for the Genesis Mission is a meaningful validation of the approach we've taken at Great Sky," said Jeff Shainline, founder and CEO of Great Sky. "For over a decade, we've believed that reaching AI's full potential requires rethinking hardware and architectures from first principles. This support will help us continue to go far beyond incremental improvements on what already exists to build transformative hardware designed for the physics of the problems we and the DOE are trying to solve."

Great Sky will participate in the Genesis Mission Summit in Washington, DC on July 22, 2026, joining the first cohort of selected teams for the initiative's official launch.