How to resolve AdBlock issue? A first-of-its-kind municipal AI initiative is taking shape in Rancho Cordova, CA, where the Human Machine Collaboration Institute (HMCI) and Rapt.ai have announced the deployment of NVIDIA GB10 systems to anchor a new regional AI & Robotics Ecosystem. The public–private partnership aims to make advanced computing accessible to students, startups, educators, and civic innovators across the Greater Sacramento region.
The announcement, made at SC25 in St. Louis, marks a significant municipal investment in applied AI. Backed by $5 million from the City of Rancho Cordova, the ecosystem will serve as a shared development space where local talent can access the same class of high-performance infrastructure used by commercial AI labs and university research centers.
At the center of the build-out is NVIDIA’s new GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip, deployed in GB10 systems to support both high-throughput training workloads and real-time robotics simulation. The ecosystem blends this on-premises performance with cloud elasticity through Rapt.ai’s workload-aware GPU orchestration and seamless scalability into NeoCloud (FarmGPU), a GPU cloud designed for distributed training, inference, and data-intensive science.
“This initiative is about unlocking opportunity through accessibility,” said Sadie St. Lawrence, CEO of HMCI. “By bringing NVIDIA-powered infrastructure to the Sacramento region and combining it with Rapt’s orchestration and NeoCloud’s scalability, we’re giving students, startups, and civic teams the power to innovate locally and impact globally.”
Rapt.ai CEO Charlie Leeming underscored the affordability gap the partnership aims to close. “NVIDIA GB10 systems deliver world-class AI performance at a fraction of traditional cloud cost,” he said. “Together with HMCI and FarmGPU, we’re proving that cities can lead the next wave of applied AI by providing practical, scalable, affordable infrastructure.”
FarmGPU CEO JM Hands added that the collaboration builds on existing momentum within Rancho Cordova’s tech corridor. “FarmGPU is proud to extend HMCI’s local AI capacity with our NeoCloud platform, strengthened by our partnership with Solidigm’s AI Central Lab in Rancho Cordova.”
Set to launch in early 2026, the AI & Robotics Ecosystem will offer both on-site and remote access for model evaluation, fine-tuning, multimodal experimentation, robotics simulation, and large-scale data science. The organizers aim to lower the barrier to AI innovation and create a civic hub where academia, industry, and government can develop applied AI solutions together.
This initiative positions Rancho Cordova as a regional leader in democratized AI infrastructure, an emerging trend at SC25, where cities, universities, and startups are increasingly exploring hybrid public–private models to support local innovation.
As the deployment moves forward, HMCI and Rapt.ai will release more details on curriculum programs, startup accelerator partnerships, and public-access options ahead of the 2026 rollout.