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View open positionsSUNNYVALE, Calif. & OAK RIDGE, Tenn., Jan. 22, 2026—Applied Intuition, Inc., the leading physical AI company, and the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), today announced a partnership to support Golden Dome for America (GDA). This innovative partnership will pair Applied Intuition’s industry-leading tooling with ORNL’s world-leading supercomputing systems and expertise, to give our nation’s missile defenders —for the first time—the cutting edge technology and computing they will need to architect and simulate massive raids of modern day missile and drone threats.
The digital proving ground will offer an environment where defenders can simulate massive raids to verify and iterate on defense logic in real-time, ensuring every system is validated and refined against the full scale of modern drone and missile threats. U.S. national security interests are increasingly at risk from proliferated hypersonic, ballistic, and cruise missile technology and lower-cost unmanned aerial systems.
From ongoing observations in Ukraine to the 2024 Iranian attack on Israel, it has become clear that the relative costs to defend against a high-low mix poses a very real challenge. Together, the Applied Intuition and ORNL teams offer a better alternative to existing simulation systems: a capability that allows users to see how systems interact at scale and evaluate a more comprehensive list of tradeoffs than current modeling, simulation, and analysis (MS&A) infrastructure cannot support.
“Golden Dome for America requires a fundamental shift in how the U.S. designs and validates missile defense,” said Applied Intuition CEO and Co-founder Qasar Younis. “Physical AI allows us to see how real-world defense systems sense, decide, and act together under pressure. By combining commercially-built software with national lab hardware and infrastructure, the Applied Intuition and ORNL teams delivered a capability that allows the Department of War to fight at machine speed and remain postured to defend against future threats.”
“This is an exciting example of how the advanced scientific expertise and world-leading HPC capabilities and infrastructure at national laboratories like ORNL can combine with the agility of commercial industry to deliver truly transformative solutions to national security challenges,” said ORNL Associate Laboratory Director for National Security Sciences Moe Khaleel. “Protecting our nation from massive, mixed raids of adversary missile and drone capabilities will require modeling and simulation capabilities that can only be delivered by high-performance computers. ORNL’s proven ability to scale mod/sim platforms and AI tools in HPC environments, combined with Applied’s robust suite of tools and applications, will enable GDA to integrate and automate existing capabilities fully, identify key technology and development gaps, and rapidly drive science and engineering solutions.”
As part of the partnership, Applied Intuition and ORNL demonstrated a homeland defense threat scenario focused on the defense of Oahu, Hawaii, showcasing a new way to model, simulate, integrate, test, and evaluate layered missile defense architectures at speed and at scale. Applied Intuition’s best-in-class tooling, Axion, was paired with an emulative node of ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer, and classified national security research and development expertise to offer a non-vendor-locked Golden Dome arena.
During the initial defense of Oahu simulation, Applied Intuition and ORNL modeled a complex engagement scenario, including conventional ballistic missiles, advanced cruise missiles, and an asymmetric containerized drone deployment in a coordinated strike against key military assets and critical infrastructure surrounding Pearl Harbor in a single unified environment.
The teams demonstrated hundreds of variations of a base scenario 80x faster than real-time and used native data exploration capabilities to enable human decision-makers to quickly make sense of simulation results and operational implications.
To learn more about how Applied Intuition is building the future of physical intelligence, visit applied.co.
About Applied Intuition
Applied Intuition, Inc. is powering the future of physical AI. Founded in 2017 and now valued at $15 billion, the Silicon Valley company is creating the digital infrastructure needed to bring intelligence to every moving machine on the planet. Applied Intuition services the automotive, defense, trucking, construction, mining and agriculture industries in three core areas: tools and infrastructure, operating systems and autonomy. Eighteen of the top 20 global automakers, as well as the United States military and its allies, trust the company’s solutions to deliver physical intelligence. Applied Intuition is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, with offices in Washington, D.C.; San Diego; Ft. Walton Beach, Florida; Ann Arbor, Michigan; London; Stuttgart; Munich; Stockholm; Bangalore; Seoul; and Tokyo. Learn more at applied.co.
About Oak Ridge National Laboratory
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s mission is to deliver scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs needed to realize solutions in energy and national security and provide economic benefit to the nation. Learn more at ornl.gov.