The University at Albany on Thursday unveiled what it called “one of the most advanced AI supercomputers at a U.S. university.”

The new artificial-intelligence system is housed at UAlbany’s uptown campus and is central to the university’s AI Plus initiative.

That initiative, the university’s website explains, integrates teaching and learning about AI throughout  academic and research programs “to ensure every graduate is prepared to live and work in a world radically changed by technology in the coming decades.”

“To realize this vision,” it goes on, “we also are dramatically expanding our supercomputing capacity through collaborations with IBM and NVIDIA to ensure our faculty, staff and students have access to some of the most innovative and powerful hardware available.”

Twenty-seven new faculty members will be affiliated with the institute, as will the many existing faculty already using AI technology in their work.

“The Institute’s mission,” the university says, “is to cultivate interdisciplinary research collaborations that will open new avenues of discovery, maximize extramural research funding, seed industry partnerships, and create high-impact undergraduate and graduate research opportunities for students focused on artificial intelligence and its many applications.”

Governor Kathy Hochul was on hand for Thursday’s unveiling.

“The world is in the midst of one of the most important races in human history,” she told the assembled crowd. “It’s a race for knowledge, wealth, prosperity, and power.”

The state awarded $75 million to UAlbany — half of it for a new downtown engineering center and the other half toward expanding UAlbany’s AI supercomputing capacity.

UAlbany launched the Center for Emerging Artificial Intelligence Systems in collaboration with IBM. Through a $20 million joint investment, the new center is promoting additional AI capacity to the campus.

“We know why superpowers like China are working overtime to dominate and build the next generation of supercomputers capable of making mass technological strides,” Hochul told the crowd. “But here in the United States, those supercomputers also exist.

“And until today, they had been in the hands of private companies: OpenAI, Google, Microsoft. Imagine all the good that can be done when that same power is in the hands of institutions like University at Albany, dedicated to the public good….

“And their objective is not to make money off of this; their objective is to foster progress for mankind, womankind, and to innovate, to be creative, to learn and improve society and the human condition. If we can solve problems that are affecting people right now, if we can use this as that tool, what an extraordinary place we will be.”

Hochul said that the Empire AI initiative is a $400 million public-private consortium that will involve other places across the state with another supercomputer at the University of Buffalo.

“The [Interstate] 90 corridor from Buffalo all the way through Albany, and other parts of our state are going to be beneficiaries as we try to create the supply chain to support the $100 billion investment,” the governor said, predicting “thousands of new jobs.”

Briefly addressing concerns about AI, Hochul said, “The fear of misappropriation should not be something that holds us back, because the good will so outweigh any negativity around it.” She noted how vaccines could be developed and weather could be better predicted with the help of artificial intelligence.

“And that’s what we have to be bold and lean hard into — when others are stepping back, we step in,” the governor said.

Hochul referred to the chancellor of the state’s university system, John B. King Jr., who also spoke at the event, as a visionary.

King says, in a video on the AI Plus Initiative site, that it will “solidify our position on the world stage and ensure any student can get a proper grounding in these paradigm-shifting technologies.”

UAlbany’s president, Havidán Rodriguez, who also spoke at the event, says in the video, “We wanted to provide the resources in terms of the faculty but also in terms of the technology in order for us to move forward.”

Rodriguez concludes, “Our goal is having our students become engaged global citizens by using this technology, this knowhow, and this expertise to transform the world.”

“For us to hit real-world problems,” says the university’s vice president for research and economic development, Thenkurussi Kesavadas, in the video, “we really need to invest in the computing that is comparable to what is available in the private domain. So we decided, let’s focus on building a computer system here which is second to none ….

“Researchers can take a real-world problem and do machine learning and come up with solutions in a week’s time perhaps, right, which we couldn't do before.”

Kesavadas concluded, “Most importantly, it gives students the power to use our AI computing to help people.”