Recipient of the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, Inria Chile receives US$2.5 million to accelerate an AI-powered digital twin of the ocean
Date :
Changed on 14/10/2026
The only Latin American institution among the 17 recipients of the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, Inria’s center in Chile will build MOFOMO, a multimodal foundation world model of the ocean to anticipate the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems.
Inria, the French National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology, announced today that its center in Chile, Inria Chile, is a recipient of the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science. Inria Chile will thus receive US$2.5 million to build a multimodal foundation world model of the ocean, the basis of a digital twin that will allow us to better understand Earth’s last great unknown.
Inria Chile is one of 17 organizations selected globally from more than 3,000 applicants across 30 countries to share an updated total of US$36 million in funding. It is the only institution from Latin America among the recipients, alongside leading universities and research institutions from around the world (Find out which projects won at https://goo.gle/gic-ai-science).
MOFOMO (https://mofomo.inria.cl) takes over from OcéanIA, Inria’s research challenge on artificial intelligence for ocean science, led by Inria Chile for five years. In this new phase, Inria Chile will lead a multidisciplinary team spanning several institutions and three continents, with Inria project-teams in France and other scientific partners in Chile and French Polynesia.
Statements about the project
Verbatim
“AI for Science means, for us, designing a new generation of models: models that learn at once from the ocean’s physics, its biology and its genomes, from sparse and heterogeneous data and in keeping with the laws that govern it, so that we can ask what climate change will do to marine life before it happens. That is MOFOMO’s ambition and its research challenge: a digital twin of the ocean, built by physicists, biologists, oceanographers and computer scientists around the same model, and Google.org’s support lets us accelerate it: train at scale, release openly and bring forward the answers the ocean needs. That is what AI for good means to us. Being selected among 17 recipients out of more than 3,000 proposals is a recognition of the work carried out at Inria Chile over many years.”
Auteur
Poste
Director General of Inria Chile and Principal investigator of MOFOMO
Verbatim
“I welcome this success, which illustrates how profoundly AI is transforming research on issues that are critical to our future. That Inria Chile is among the recipients of the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science, alongside the world’s leading research institutions, shows what Franco-Chilean cooperation and the mobilisation of the entire artificial intelligence ecosystem can achieve in the face of a global challenge. This ambitious project builds on the Inria OcéanIA Challenge, whose full potential it will now realise, and I also want to salute all the work accomplished over the years.”
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Chairman and CEO of Inria
Verbatim
“We’re at an extraordinary moment for science, as advances in AI open up new possibilities for discovery that were difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Inria Chile is bringing together AI and deep scientific expertise in ambitious, creative ways to address some of humanity’s most important questions. We’re honored to support their work as they apply AI to the ocean, the least observed system on Earth, to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and turn breakthrough ideas into real-world impact.”
Auteur
Poste
Director of Scientific Progress de Google.org.