DAVID SALVAGNINI
AI STRATEGY
The modern era: Scaling scientific AI The partnership between NASA and Nvidia has evolved substantially in recent years, showing the maturation of deep learning from experimental technique to essential scientific infrastructure.
NASA now hosts annual GPU hackathons where teams from multiple NASA centres collaborate on accelerating computational fluid dynamics and AI applications, often achieving performance improvements ranging from 40 % to 250 times faster processing.
The space agency has also embraced Nvidia’ s RAPIDS data science libraries to accelerate workflows ranging from atmospheric chemistry simulation to air quality forecasting.
Christoph Keller at NASA’ s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office uses ML to simulate chemical transformations in the atmosphere, reducing the computational cost of running comprehensive air quality models like GEOS-CF, which simulates 250 chemical species in near real-time.
David Salvagnini, who serves as Chief Data Officer( CDO) and Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer( CAIO) at NASA says:“ AI has been very involved in the use of AI and ML – helping in the discovery of exoplanets and planetary exploration, including autonomous systems such as the Mars Perseverance Rover.”
In recent years, Nvidia and NASA have been working closely on accelerating data science workflows using RAPIDS and integrating these GPU-accelerated libraries with scientific use cases.
Inside Nvidia’ s investment in scientific AI Today, the relationship has evolved beyond individual projects into infrastructure development.
The US National Science Foundation announced a partnership with Nvidia to develop a set of AI models that will transform the ability of America’ s scientists to leverage AI, advancing scientific discovery and ensuring US leadership in AI-powered research and innovation.
NSF will contribute US $ 75m, with Nvidia providing an additional US $ 77m, to support the Open Multimodal AI Infrastructure to Accelerate Science( OMAI) project, led by the Allen Institute for AI( Ai2).
DAVID SALVAGNINI
TITLE: CHIEF DATA OFFICER AND CHIEF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE OFFICER
COMPANY: NASA INDUSTRY: AEROSPACE
David Salvagnini serves as NASA’ s CDO and CAIO. With over 20 years in technology leadership, he leads NASA’ s AI strategy to support space exploration and scientific research, emphasising responsible, transparent and innovative AI adoption.
136 November 2025