Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos is a small town in the US state of New Mexico. It is home to one of the largest research laboratories in the United States. It belongs to the state and is funded by the US Department of Energy. It was founded in 1943, in the middle of World War II, to develop the first atomic bomb there. This secret undertaking was called the Manhattan Project. Today around 17,000 people work in Los Alamos on very different topics: nuclear weapons, materials, climate issues, and increasingly computer technology.

From Bomb Lab to Data Center

Los Alamos appears in current news mostly for two reasons. The first is historical. The lab stands for the moment when scientists created a technology whose consequences even frightened themselves. This exact comparison is now often applied to artificial intelligence. When politicians call for a “Manhattan Project for AI,” they mean a state-funded major effort with the best available personnel.

The second reason is more practical. Los Alamos owns supercomputers, machines made up of thousands of connected individual computers. Such facilities cost hundreds of millions of dollars and are found almost exclusively at states or very large corporations. Anyone who wants to understand where the world’s strongest computing power is located cannot avoid such laboratories.

There is also a role as a testing body. Because the lab deals with nuclear weapons, it has expertise in security and secrecy. That is why it is also consulted when US authorities want to know whether an AI system could be misused for dangerous purposes.

Simulation Instead of Real Tests

Since 1992, the US has no longer conducted real nuclear weapons tests. Nevertheless, the state must know whether its existing warheads still work. This question can only be answered by computer. A digital representation of the physics is built, and the computer is used to simulate what would happen during an explosion. It was precisely for this purpose that ever faster computers were procured in Los Alamos over the decades.

These computers consist of graphics processing units, or GPUs for short. These are special chips that perform very many simple calculations simultaneously. They originally came from computer games. It turned out that AI models require the same kind of calculation. As a result, facilities built for weapons simulations are suddenly also suitable for training language models.

One example is the Venado computer, which went into operation in 2024. It was built together with chip manufacturer Nvidia and explicitly designed for AI research as well. Another lab from the same family, Oak Ridge in Tennessee, operates Frontier, one of the fastest computers in the world.

When the Name Makes Headlines

In everyday life, one rarely encounters Los Alamos directly. In business news, however, it comes up frequently. A typical occasion: an AI company like OpenAI or Anthropic announces a collaboration with a US national laboratory. This usually involves testing models on scientific tasks or examining their risks.

A second occasion is chip orders. When Nvidia or AMD deliver hardware to a national laboratory, it is a signal for the entire industry. Such orders are seen as evidence that demand for computing power does not come only from the private sector.

An important distinction should be made. Los Alamos is not a company and not a university. It is a government-contracted laboratory, operated by a consortium of companies and universities. One can neither study there nor buy shares in it. In reports, the name usually stands for state-funded cutting-edge research and for the question of how closely the military and AI development are converging.