"The IRS Is Buying an AI Supercomputer From Nvidia"
From The Intercept, February 14:
As the Trump administration and its cadre of Silicon
Valley machine-learning evangelists attempt to restructure the
administrative state, the IRS is preparing to purchase advanced
artificial intelligence hardware, according to procurement materials
reviewed by The Intercept.
With Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency installing itself at the IRS amid a broader push to replace federal bureaucracy with machine-learning software, the tax agency’s computing center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, will soon be home to a state-of-the-art Nvidia SuperPod AI computing cluster. According to the previously unreported February 5 acquisition document,
the setup will combine 31 separate Nvidia servers, each containing
eight of the company’s flagship Blackwell processors designed to train
and operate artificial intelligence models that power tools like
ChatGPT.
The hardware has not yet been purchased and installed, nor is a price listed, but SuperPod systems reportedly
start at $7 million. The setup described in the contract materials
notes that it will include a substantial memory upgrade from Nvidia.
Though small compared to the massive AI-training data centers
deployed by companies like OpenAI and Meta, the SuperPod is still a
powerful and expensive setup using the most advanced technology offered
by Nvidia, whose chips have facilitated the global machine-learning
spree. While the hardware can be used in many ways, it’s marketed as a
turnkey means of creating and querying an AI model. Last year, the MITRE
Corporation, a federally funded military R&D lab, acquired a $20
million SuperPod setup to train bespoke AI models for use by government
agencies, touting the purchase as a “massive increase in computing
power” for the United States.
How exactly the IRS will use its SuperPod is unclear. An agency
spokesperson said the IRS had no information to share on the
supercomputer purchase, including which presidential administration
ordered it. A 2024 report by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax
Administration identified 68 different AI-related projects underway at
the IRS; the Nvidia cluster is not named among them, though many were
redacted.
But some clues can be gleaned from the purchase materials. “The IRS
requires a robust and scalable infrastructure that can handle complex
machine learning (ML) workloads,” the document explains. “The Nvidia
Super Pod is a critical component of this infrastructure, providing the
necessary compute power, storage, and networking capabilities to support
the development and deployment of large-scale ML models.”
The document notes that the SuperPod will be run by the IRS Research,
Applied Analytics, and Statistics division, or RAAS, which leads a
variety of data-centric initiatives at the agency. While no specific
uses are cited, it states that this division’s Compliance Data Warehouse
project, which is behind this SuperPod purchase, has previously used
machine learning for automated fraud detection, identity theft
prevention, and generally gaining a “deeper understanding of the
mechanisms that drive taxpayer behavior.”
“The IRS has probably more proprietary data than most agencies that is totally untapped.”
It’s unclear from the document whether the SuperPod purchase had been
planned under the Biden administration or if it represents a new
initiative of the Trump administration....
