How MITRE Uses NVIDIA DGX to Power a Federal AI Sandbox

For more than 65 years, MITRE has operated at the intersection of government and technology, running federally funded research and development centers that tackle pressing national challenges. As AI matured, MITRE recognized both an opportunity and a responsibility: to give government sponsors a controlled, affordable environment to experiment with AI before deploying it in high-stakes settings.

MITRE’s existing AI infrastructure was fragmented across various generations of NVIDIA accelerated computing hardware, limiting the scale of experiments and preventing researchers from sharing models and datasets efficiently. Demand from government sponsors was growing faster than the decentralized setup could handle, and the organization needed a unifying platform to run foundational model training, simulation, and evaluation side by side.

MITRE built the Federal AI Sandbox by consolidating its compute assets and adding an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD at the center. The SuperPOD can process multiple data types—images, audio, complex sensor data—simultaneously and serves thousands of researchers across the organization. The Sandbox also integrates NVIDIA Omniverse for simulation and visualization, NVIDIA Earth-2 for weather forecasting, and NVIDIA PhysicsNeMo for physics-informed modeling, creating a full stack from raw data ingestion to deployed AI solutions.

Across the Federal AI Sandbox, several high-impact projects have reached production or advanced proof-of-concept stage. In partnership with NOAA and the National Weather Service, MITRE is developing ocean weather forecasts at one-kilometer precision using Earth-2 and Omniverse, directly improving maritime safety and hurricane preparedness. A separate team is building a cybersecurity foundational model to combat the global shortage of security analysts. A third initiative uses the Sandbox to analyze multi-department government data and streamline public benefits administration, reducing fraud and accelerating aid delivery.

The Federal AI Sandbox has shifted MITRE’s relationship with government sponsors from ad hoc project support to a shared infrastructure model. Sponsors can now test and evaluate AI capabilities on a neutral, trusted platform before committing to adoption, and MITRE acts as a bridge between commercial AI innovation and government mission needs. The organization views the Sandbox as a national asset that will grow alongside AI’s role in public-sector decision-making.