Zuckerberg and Chan's Biohub assembles $1.8 billion push to build an AI 'virtual cell'

On 7 October 2026, at its first AIxBio event in San Francisco, Biohub, the non-profit research organisation founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, announced that its Virtual Biology Initiative now has about $1.8 billion in backing. New partners include the US Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta, alongside research centres such as the Broad Institute, the Allen Institute, the Arc Institute, the Human Cell Atlas and the Wellcome Sanger Institute, with NVIDIA providing computing support.

The goal is to create huge, standardised and openly available datasets that let artificial-intelligence models predict how human cells behave and how they respond to drugs, mutations or changes in their environment. Scientists call such a model a 'virtual cell'. Biohub's head of science, Alex Rives, has said existing datasets cover hundreds of millions of cells, while a reliable model may need measurements from billions and eventually trillions. He expects a first dataset in roughly a year and useful predictive models within about five years.

The headline figure combines new money with existing resources. Biohub itself pledged $500 million in April 2026, most of it for new measurement technologies. The Department of Energy plans to contribute more than $500 million over five years through its Genesis Mission, the NIH is contributing datasets built with more than $500 million of earlier federal funding, and the three technology companies are jointly investing $300 million in technology and data. According to reporting relayed by eWeek, commercial funders will get a year of early access to data they help generate before it becomes public.

The initiative is the clearest expression of the shift Zuckerberg and Chan announced in late 2025, when they said Biohub would become the main focus of their philanthropy, concentrating on combining biology with AI to help cure, prevent or manage disease. Biohub has since acquired the AI lab EvolutionaryScale, whose co-founder Rives now leads its science.