Biohub, Google DeepMind and Meta back $1.8 billion AI biology push

Big Tech has spent years teaching AI to write emails, generate images and summarize meetings. Now some of its biggest names want it to understand the human cell. Google DeepMind, Meta Platforms and Isomorphic Labs will collectively put an additional $300 million into the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub’s Virtual Biology Initiative. The expansion, announced on October 7, 2026, brings the program’s total commitment to $1.8 billion. Who is paying for what The US Department of Energy is contributing more than $500 million over the next five years. That federal money targets advanced measurement, modeling and computational work. The National Institutes of Health is taking a different role. Rather than writing a new check, it will coordinate existing datasets that have already received over $500 million in federal funding. The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub launched the program in April 2026 with an initial $500 million commitment. Six months later, the price tag has more than tripled. The total is being billed as the largest commitment for AI-ready biological data to date. The data problem nobody could ignore According to the research summary of the announcement, existing datasets contain only hundreds ...