On 14 October 2026, Inria announced that its centre in Chile, Inria Chile, is a recipient of the Google.org Impact Challenge: AI for Science.
The US$2.5 million grant funds MOFOMO for 36 months for builing a multimodal foundation world model of the ocean, the basis of a digital twin that can anticipate the effects of climate change on marine ecosystems.
Inria Chile is one of 17 organisations selected from more than 3,000 applicants in 30 countries, which share a total of US$36 million. It is the only institution from Latin America among them.
- Press release from Inria: in French.
- Press release from Inria Chile: in English or Spanish.
- Google.Org GIC 2026 results announcement: 17 organizations using AI to accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
Why the ocean
The ocean regulates the climate and feeds billions of people, yet it is the least observed system on Earth, and its data (satellites, floats, biological and genomic surveys) are scattered across mutually incompatible formats. Scientists still cannot reliably connect the warming and acidification of the ocean to their effects on marine life: harmful algal blooms, coral bleaching, the collapse of fisheries.
MOFOMO will build the first open multimodal foundation world model that learns at once from the ocean’s physical, biological and genomic observations, coupled with physics-based models for reliable and explainable forecasts. The research programme sets out the approach.
From OcéanIA to MOFOMO
MOFOMO 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 leads a multidisciplinary team spanning several institutions and three continents, with Inria project-teams in France and scientific partners in Chile and French Polynesia.
What they said
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.
Nayat Sánchez-Pi, Director General of Inria Chile and principal investigator of MOFOMO
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.
Bruno Sportisse, Chairman and CEO of Inria
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.
Leslie Yeh, Director of Scientific Progress, Google.org