The U.S. just bet $1 billion that AI supercomputers can turn most cancers from ‘death sentences’ to ‘manageable conditions’ within 8 years

A female doctor encourages a young woman with cancer by holding hands on the patient's bed. (Credit: Witthaya Prasongsin—Getty Images)

The U.S. government is making a billion-dollar bet that AI can do what decades of “moonshots” have failed to: make cancer more manageable and much more survivable.

In a newly announced partnership with Advanced Micro Devices, the Department of Energy (DOE) will build two of the world’s most advanced AI supercomputers—Lux and Discovery—to accelerate research across fusion energy, national defense, and cancer treatment, according to a Reuters report.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Reuters the machines could, in “the next five or eight years,” help turn “most cancers, many of which today are ultimate death sentences, into manageable conditions.”

For scientists like Trey Ideker, who leads a precision-oncology program funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the claim is both exciting and incomplete.

“Can we make a massive dent in cancer with AI and big data in the next eight years? Absolutely,” he told Fortune. “Is AI alone going to solve cancer? No.”