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Empire AI is a public-interest AI and advanced computing initiative launched by New York State in April 2024 under Governor Kathy Hochul. Its core purpose is to move frontier AI research capacity out of a purely commercial model and into a shared academic ecosystem where researchers can pursue work in medicine, education, climate, energy, and public services without relying entirely on private-sector compute. The initiative is backed by more than $500 million in combined public, private, and philanthropic support. That capital structure matters. Training and operating large AI systems now requires levels of infrastructure spending that most universities cannot sustain on their own. Empire AI answers that constraint by pooling state capital, institutional commitments, and philanthropic backing into a single shared facility at the University at Buffalo.
Empire AI is designed around a “purpose, not profit” model. The central argument is that advanced AI capacity should support public-good research, statewide workforce development, and broad academic access rather than only private monetization.

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Founding members

The consortium launched with seven founding academic and research partners:
  • SUNY
  • CUNY
  • Columbia University
  • Cornell University
  • New York University
  • Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
  • Flatiron Institute
These institutions formed the initial governance and cost-sharing base for the Empire AI computing center.

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Expanded membership

A later expansion, enabled by FY26 state budget support, brought three more institutions into the shared resource pool:
  • University of Rochester
  • Rochester Institute of Technology
  • Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
The University of Rochester is especially notable because it extends the consortium deeper into health-system research. In practice, that broadens Empire AI’s reach into clinical data science, biomedical informatics, and translational healthcare workloads.

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What the consortium is trying to do

Empire AI is not just buying faster hardware. It is building a research ecosystem with four linked goals:
  • Lower the barrier to large-scale AI research for New York universities.
  • Support high-impact work in healthcare, climate, education, and scientific discovery.
  • Train students, faculty, and technical staff for AI-intensive work.
  • Keep economic and talent development inside New York State.
Philanthropic backing from Tom Secunda and the Simons Foundation helps stabilize that model while reinforcing the long-term public mission. In combination with state capital and university participation, that support gives Empire AI enough institutional weight to function as shared infrastructure rather than a short-lived pilot. For CUNY HPCC readers, the practical takeaway is that Empire AI sits adjacent to the local HPC environment: it is a larger, consortium-scale AI platform that complements HPCC by opening access to higher-end AI infrastructure and statewide collaboration pathways.