NASA climate data copied to Swiss supercomputer for AI training amid US funding cuts

Researchers have copied massive quantities of publicly-available climate and environmental data from NASA onto a Swiss supercomputer to train artificial intelligence models and for safekeeping amid US funding cuts.

Switzerland’s Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) university announced the move late last week, saying its researchers had copied around 100 petabytes of NASA data to the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in the southern city of Lugano.

“The sheer amount is impossible to visualise,” Reto Knutti, professor of climate physics and head of ETH’s Center for Climate Systems Modeling (C2SM), told AFP.