Applied Intuition may have cut its teeth in commercial autonomous vehicle software, but the $15B Silicon Valley hotshot is taking the defense world by storm—including on some of the Pentagon’s most ambitious projects.
We’re talking Golden Dome, baby.
Today, in an exclusive release to Tectonic, Applied Intuition announced that they’ve teamed up with the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to build out a simulated missile defense environment designed as a “digital proving ground” for the Golden Dome for America program.
Feeling golden: That’s good timing, because if there’s anything we’ve learned in the past week, it’s that the White House isn’t joking around about the Golden Dome. Industry isn’t either.
- Golden Dome for America (GDA), formally announced in May, is envisioned as a future layered missile defense architecture that integrates space-based sensors, interceptor systems, directed energy weapons, and everything in between to defend the continental US from missile threats.
- So far, the Missile Defense Agency has qualified a whopping 2,100 companies to compete for future contracts under the $151B-ceiling, Golden Dome-focused Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) program.
The Pentagon and MDA hasn’t yet released a whole lot of information on what technology, exactly, it’s looking for companies to build for the Golden Dome, but the Applied Intuition—which was awarded a contract for GDA simulation under the SHIELD IDIQ—and ORNL partnership is meant to simulate what works and what doesn’t before they really start dipping into that $151B pot of cash.
Power play: That requires a heck of a lot of computing power, and that’s where the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee comes in. ORNL, the DOE’s largest science and energy lab by size and third largest by budget, has a handy focus on high-performance computing, housing some of the world’s most advanced supercomputers.
That includes the Frontier supercomputer, the world’s second most powerful—and the one Applied Intuition is tapping into to build a simulated Golden Dome. And according to the company, Applied and ORNL aren’t starting from scratch.
Supermodel: Late last year, Applied’s Axion software was paired with a simulation-focused computer, called an emulative node, within Frontier.
- Axion, rolled out last May, is Applied’s “development cloud” designed to offer high-fidelity, all-domain simulated environments for companies—and the government—to test and train different systems.
- On the Golden Dome front, Axion can model threat system behavior, offer data visualization analysis, and validate software to streamline the development, refinement, and assessment of prospective missile defense systems in the broader architecture.
In that initial demonstration, Applied’s Axion software and ORNL’s Frontier modelled a “complex engagement scenario, including conventional ballistic missiles, advanced cruise missiles, and an asymmetric containerized drone deployment in a coordinated strike” against military assets and critical infrastructure in Oahu, Hawaii.
Through hundreds of iterations, the teams found that they were able to simulate different threat environments eighty times faster than real-time and “used native data exploration capabilities to enable human decision-makers to quickly make sense of simulation results and operational implications.”
Scale up: Now, Applied and ORNL are working on scaling up the original simulated scenario to other environments, like cities or vulnerable critical infrastructure, as the government’s Golden Dome team fleshes out the full architecture. Ultimately, the two are aiming to scale the system to the entire Golden Dome system across the continental US, and Applied is pretty excited about where this public-private partnership with ORNL can go.
“Physical AI allows us to see how real-world defense systems sense, decide, and act together under pressure,” Applied Intuition CEO and Co-founder Qasar Younis said in a statement. “By combining commercially-built software with national lab hardware and infrastructure, the Applied Intuition and ORNL teams delivered a capability that allows the Department of War to fight at machine speed and remain postured to defend against future threats.”