Google joins Biohub in $1.8 billion biology data push

Alphabet, through its AI division Google DeepMind, has joined Meta and drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs to jointly invest $300 million in Biohub, the non-profit organisation announced on 7 October 2026. The new commitments, alongside US government participation, raise total funding for the project to $1.8 billion.

The public-private effort supports the Virtual Biology Initiative, which seeks to standardise cellular data to train predictive artificial intelligence models that could accelerate multi-year drug development timelines. As part of the funding, the US Department of Energy will contribute more than $500 million over five years toward laboratory measurements, modelling, and computing. Additionally, the National Institutes of Health will coordinate datasets built with over $500 million in prior federal funding, and the initiative previously received $500 million in April 2026 from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Commercial backers including Alphabet and Meta will receive early access under embargo periods before the datasets become available as open public scientific resources, according to Alex Rives, head of science at Biohub. Rives noted that parallel government-funded work will have no such restrictions, while current cellular datasets must scale from hundreds of millions of cells to billions or trillions to train accurate models.

Biohub partners plan to compress decades of research into five years, aiming to release a first dataset in about one year and achieve accurate predictive models within five years. The push comes amid rival initiatives, including Anthropic's wet lab expansion and an OpenAI Foundation grant programme exceeding $125 million for biological datasets.