The Massachusetts AI Hub offers the MA AI Models Innovation Challenge, a competitive grant program that funds universities and nonprofits to develop domain-specific AI models for priority sectors such as health care, life sciences, advanced manufacturing, and climate tech. The first round awarded $2.9 million across multiple awardees in October 2025; a second round was open as of mid-2026.

The program, launched in January 2025 under MassTech's Innovation Institute, provides up to $1 million per project for data curation, model training, and deployment planning. Applicants may propose training entirely new foundation models or fine-tuning existing open-source models for specific use cases. All awardees are required to contribute at least one publicly shareable artifact—such as a trained model, dataset, or documentation—to the MA AI Hub Data Commons. MassTech received 61 submissions in the first round and selected awardees through a competitive review evaluating impact potential and responsible AI practices.