SES AI Corporation, a global provider in developing and manufacturing high-performance Li-Metal batteries, announced a groundbreaking initiative to accelerate material discovery in electric transportation.
By mapping the universe of small molecules using a cutting-edge supercomputer optimized for artificial intelligence (AI), this pioneering project aims to revolutionize the understanding of battery chemistry, enhance energy storage solutions, and advance energy efficiency.
The initiative will leverage Crusoe’s innovative and purpose-built AI cloud platform, powered by NVIDIA and Supermicro, showcasing a unique collaboration at the intersection of science, computing, and sustainable computing.
The untapped potential in battery chemistry
Optimizing electrolytes — composed of small molecules — is critical to unlocking the full potential of lithium-metal batteries. Over the past 30 years, the battery industry has studied roughly 1,000 (103) organic molecules and achieved a coulombic efficiency of over 99.6%.
However, there are an estimated 1012 organic molecules under 20 atoms and 1060 organic molecules under 30 atoms, indicating vast untapped potential for discovering new molecules that could revolutionize battery technology and have significant implications for all of science.
Revolutionizing battery innovation with AI
SES AI, known for its lithium-metal batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) and urban air mobility (UAM), has been at the forefront of battery technology since its founding in 2012. SES AI has continually pushed the envelope in battery safety and performance, leveraging AI to accelerate innovation.
SES AI’s AI-driven initiatives include:
- AI for manufacturing: Analysing manufacturing data to ensure quality and safety.
- AI for safety: Predicting battery incidents to ensure nearly 100% battery safety in the field.
- AI for science: Mapping the molecular universe to discover next-generation materials.
“AI is changing everything. Our AI for Manufacturing, AI for Safety, and AI for Science models are accelerating the commercialization, time to revenue, and profitability of Li-Metal for EV and UAM,” said Qichao Hu, CEO of SES AI.
Harnessing the power of AI
The AI for Science initiative begins with the use of NVIDIA HGX H100 GPU clusters to generate a comprehensive database, predicting the electronic structures and properties of each molecule. This database will be the foundation for the construction, pre-training, and fine-tuning of physics-informed machine learning (ML) models leveraging Crusoe Cloud H100 virtualized instances built with NVIDIA HGX technology.”
Expanding upon the capabilities of the foundation model, SES AI will next construct, train, and fine-tune an advanced generative model.
These efforts are uniquely supported by Crusoe’s sustainable computing infrastructure, helping ensure that the intensive computational tasks are carried out efficiently and with minimal environmental impact.
The final phase will involve the creation of a multimodal large language model (LLM) and AI agent, training a 70-billion-parameter Llama 3 model on approximately 200 billion tokens from various battery-related texts and literature. This is enabled by the NVIDIA accelerated computing platform and Supermicro’s high-performance hardware, significantly broadening the scope and accuracy of SES AI’s predictive capabilities.
The most promising candidates from this AI-driven analysis will undergo rigorous laboratory testing in SES AI’s Electrolyte Foundry, where the candidates will be synthesized, evaluated in battery cells, and assessed for real-world performance.
“With access to more NVIDIA GPUs, we expect to map a large enough molecular universe that our AI model training will reach sufficient accuracy. Once we have this map, we believe we can accelerate material discovery for any battery problem. This includes not just Li-Metal for EVs and UAMs, but also Li-ion batteries for consumer electronics, grid storage, automotive, and other applications,” added Hu.
Powering AI for science
Crusoe Cloud is a purpose-built AI-cloud platform that offers the latest NVIDIA GPUs, high-performance networking and storage solutions. Crusoe powers its cloud platform by developing, building, and utilizing a differentiated portfolio of clean energy solutions to minimize the environmental impacts of both energy production and computing.
This project will leverage Crusoe’s climate-aligned cloud platform, powered by NVIDIA and Supermicro.
“By collaborating with Crusoe, NVIDIA, and Supermicro, we combine cutting-edge AI with sustainable computing infrastructure to drive breakthroughs in battery innovation. This project embodies our commitment to sustainability and technological advancement,” said Hu.
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