The former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt donated $48 million to the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which runs the the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator. The money will fund artificial intelligence tools to analyze data from the LHC. Bloomberg was first to report the donation.
CERN has made myriad discoveries, including detecting the so-called “God particle,” the Higgs boson, at the lab. But it is courting donors as it looks to build a bigger accelerator and stay ahead of China, which also plans to build the world’s largest particle accelerator in the next decade.
“If China were to start their project before CERN, there is a risk of Europe and the US also losing the leadership in high-energy particle physics, and also in the technology development that goes with it,” said Charlotte Warakaulle, CERN’s director of international relations.