Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure

The National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, a sub-office within the civilian National Science Foundation, funds cyberinfrastructure research, development, and deployment across the U.S. academic and research community. The Office operates primarily through federal grants rather than contracts, backing computational resources, networking systems, and software platforms that enable cutting-edge science across disciplines.

The Office has issued 1,672 federal grants totaling $1.09 billion obligated since 2004, with grant activity running at 207 awards in 2023, 220 in 2024, 205 in 2025, and 160 in 2026, plus 6 recorded for 2027 so far. The vast majority of awards are Project Grants (1,646 awards, 98%), with Cooperative Agreements accounting for the remaining 2 percent. Grant recipients are highly fragmented: the top five institutions by award count hold only 11 percent of recent awards and 11 percent of recent federal dollars obligated over the last five years. University of California, San Diego leads both rankings with 28 awards and $40.5 million in federal dollars obligated. The Ohio State University and University of Illinois each received 21 awards; The University of Chicago received 18; and University of Utah received 16. By federal dollars, University of Texas at Austin ($21.6 million across 15 awards) and Carnegie-Mellon University ($18.8 million across 11 awards) rank second and third, reflecting variation between award count and funding intensity across the recipient portfolio.

The Office maintains a single recorded federal contract award issued in April 2014 for $99 thousand with no set-aside designation, representing dormant contract activity across the portfolio history. No recent contract opportunities are recorded against the Office.

The Office's grant portfolio is dominated by university recipients pursuing research in high-performance computing, data management, networking, and scientific software. The recipient base spans 322 distinct institutions, indicating broad distribution of funding across the research community. Recent grant activity has tapered slightly in 2026 relative to the 200-plus annual awards of prior years, signaling either seasonal timing in the current year's cycle or a shift in funding allocation. Grant opportunity solicitations from the Office typically target research institutions and consortia with cyberinfrastructure or computational-science focus; prospecting should emphasize institutional research capacity and alignment with NSF-funded computing or networking missions.

The Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure (OAC) supports and coordinates the development, acquisition, and provision of state-of-the-art cyberinfrastructure resources, tools and services essential to the advancement and transformation of science and engineering. OAC also supports forward-looking research and education to expand the future capabilities of cyberinfrastructure specific to science and engineering. By fostering a vibrant ecosystem of technologies and a skilled workforce of developers, researchers, staff and users, OAC serves the growing community of scientists and engineers, across all disciplines, whose work relies on the power of an advanced research cyberinfrastructure