Arizona State University (ASU) received a multi-million dollar technology donation from Intel which will expand the capabilities of the university AI processing power up to ten times.
The deal gives researchers and students access to computing capacity that previously required time on expensive and oversubscribed national supercomputing systems, and it puts a significant portion of that power directly into the hands of students through ASU’s existing AI toolkit.
The material does not sit in a laboratory waiting for a privileged few. It underpins the ASU AI Research Acceleration Platform (AIR Platform), a university-wide initiative led by ASU Knowledge Enterprise that combines Intel’s AI accelerator chips with ASU’s Sol supercomputer.
Anyone at the university, whether researchers, faculty or staff, can access it through CreateAI, ASU’s flagship AI toolkit, which features large open source language models, including Google’s Gemma and Meta’s Llama Scout. Users connect these models to the expanded computing capacity and create personalized AI experiences using their own data.
More than 8,000 custom AI experiences have already been created through CreateAI Builder across academic, research, and operations.
“At ASU, this powerful and transformative technology must be accessible,” says President Michael Crow. “Lowering barriers to entry and encouraging researchers and students to use AI will promote the search for innovative solutions to address our biggest societal challenges. This collaboration with Intel reflects our shared commitment to the principled application of AI to advance research and advance education. »
What the new ability changes
Prior to the donation, ASU operated hundreds of NVIDIA GPUs powering Sol. Intel chips don’t replace that. They expand and diversify it, creating room for thousands of additional users working on generative AI without taking up resources needed for other compute-heavy projects.
Sean Dudley, associate vice president of Knowledge Enterprise and head of the Research Technology Office, said: “The technology introduces a new type of high-performance computing capability. This technology allows us to support thousands of additional users developing or engaging generative AI models while moving these workloads from our existing resources to free them for other compute-intensive projects.
Importantly, ASU manages the platform as a regional cloud offering, meaning the data remains under the control of the university. This is a practical selling point for researchers working with sensitive datasets who might otherwise face privacy trade-offs when using external IT services.
Sally C. Morton, executive vice president of ASU Knowledge Enterprise, said: “The AIR platform is not just infrastructure: it is a coordinated programmatic capability that lowers the barriers to advanced AI methods across disciplines. By making these tools accessible and integrated into research workflows, we enable faculty and students to move from idea to understanding more quickly. This is the heart of Knowledge Enterprise: accelerating discovery and translating it into tangible impact at scale.
Chest X-rays in the classroom
The donation is already producing tangible results. Jianming Liang, a professor at the College of Health Solutions, developed an AI tool called Ark+ in June 2025 that helps doctors interpret chest X-rays more accurately, drawing on more than six public datasets of medical images accompanied by doctors’ notes. He now plans to use the new computing power to train a much larger model on more than 1,000 datasets, capable of precisely identifying and localizing diseases throughout the body rather than just those visible on chest imaging.
This also applies to how AI is taught. Suren Jayasuriya, an associate professor in the GAME School and the School of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, integrated AI accelerators directly into his deep learning course, tasking students with comparing machine learning workloads on the new chips versus traditional GPUs. This is a practical comparison that most undergraduates would not be able to approach at other institutions.
The relationship between Intel and ASU predates this donation. The two have a long-standing partnership focused on addressing the labor shortage in the U.S. semiconductor industry, spanning graduate and undergraduate research, faculty training, curriculum development and experiential learning. The broader goal is an integrated talent pipeline from K-12 through higher education, and the IT Gift fits perfectly into that effort.