Funder: U.S. National Science Foundation
Due Dates: November 4, 2026 (Full proposal)
Funding Amounts: Planning: up to $200,000 | Impact: up to $2 million over 3 years | Flagship: up to $5 million over 3 years
Summary: Supports enhancement of existing scientific community datasets for AI-enabled discovery, automated analysis, and interdisciplinary research.
Key Information: Collecting new datasets is out of scope; multi-organization proposals require one lead organization with subawards.
Description
NSF’s AI Datasets program funds work that increases the scientific value of existing datasets by making them more accessible, easier to integrate, and ready for automated AI-driven analysis. It supports AI-based feature extraction, metadata generation, dataset integration, robust data pipelines, and augmentation or harmonization of existing datasets. Projects should enable new scientific questions, interdisciplinary research, or investigations beyond the original purpose of data collection.
The program emphasizes trusted, accessible datasets curated with scientific community expertise. Proposals should address security, integrity, governance, community contributions, availability, and sustainment. NSF encourages use of existing national infrastructure rather than duplicating resources. Planning grants support early-stage community engagement and concept development, while Impact and Flagship awards support dataset enhancements at different scales.
