Ai2 Secures Google Funding to Develop NeuralGCM+ for Long-Term Climate Projections
Ai2 has launched the NeuralGCM+ project, funded by Google.org, to create an open-source hybrid physics-AI model for simulating coupled atmosphere-ocean dynamics over decades.
Non-profit AI research institute Ai2 announced on November 4, 2026, that it has secured multimillion-dollar, three-year funding from Google.org and technical support from Google Research to develop NeuralGCM+, an open-source climate model. The initiative aims to combine physical equations with artificial intelligence to simulate coupled atmosphere and ocean dynamics, providing faster and more reliable long-term climate projections.
Unlike traditional climate models which are computationally expensive, or existing AI weather models that focus on short-term forecasts (days to months), NeuralGCM+ targets predictions of regional temperature and rainfall trends over decades up to mid-century. This capability is critical for water resource planning and community adaptation to climate change.
Technically, NeuralGCM+ extends Google Research's existing NeuralGCM architecture, which uses physical equations for large-scale dynamics and AI for smaller-scale processes like cloud formation and rainfall. Ai2 plans to link this with ocean and sea-ice models to capture how oceans absorb and redistribute heat—a major influence on long-term climate. The team also intends to improve performance on widely used GPUs and release documented workflows to enable outside researchers to train and adapt the models.
While Ai2's previous ACE models demonstrated that AI could speed up specific experiments by roughly 100 times, purely data-driven models struggle to reliably project future climates they have not experienced. NeuralGCM+'s hybrid design attempts to address this by giving the AI a simpler learning problem, though demonstrating reliable future projections remains a central research task.