The DOE does a lot of "energy consuming" or less than environmentally friendly work, to include, historically, nuclear tests, and also has had ownership of some

The DOE does a lot of "energy consuming" or less than environmentally friendly work, to include, historically, nuclear tests, and also has had ownership of some of the largest TOP500 supercomputers over the years. Large compute projects such as an open language model aren't too far from their usual. You could easily argue the race to AGI is the closest thing to a modern Manhattan Project we've had in some time. Whether that's a good allocation of resources is debatable, but from a national strategic perspective this makes sense, since private industry has pulled out of government contracts before in the LLM space (see Anthropic), this is just hedging their bets.