The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking to expand its on-prem AI capacity.

As reported by FedScoop, the FBI has put out a contract opportunity notice for the acquisition of GPU servers for AI on SAM.Gov.

In a multiple-award IDIQ opportunity, the FBI is seeking proposals for enterprise AI compute servers (x4), rack-scale AI systems (x2), pod-scale AI systems (x1), AI inference servers and "expansion hardware" (x10), high-speed network interface cards, data processing units, and more.

Based on an attached document, the government wants to acquire the hardware for the following purposes: AI, machine learning, LLM training and inference, computer vision, advanced analytics, and enterprise AI workloads.

The IDIQ contract has a collective ceiling of $88 million.

The FBI has not named a specific hardware supplier or the desired compute capability of the GPUs. Currently, a rack-scale Nvidia GB200 NVL72 system is priced in the range of $3-4 million, while the newest Vera Rubin rack-scale system is expected to cost between $5m and $7m.

During a recent event, FBI chief AI officer Katie Noyes noted that the cost of AI hardware is a challenge. “If I’m being candid, the price point for us right now in the FBI, it’s a little steep,” she told the audience.

A previous request for information put out by the FBI in June included additional details about the department's expectations, including that it would require the hardware to include Intel Xeon 6767P processors or equivalent/better and a minimum of 2TB of RAM (with pricing options to increase memory capacity up to 4TB), one HGX B300 eight-GPU air-cooled assembly or equivalent.

Storage was expected to include two 500GB or larger SSD boot drives and two 7.68TB or larger SSD data drives. Networking required two 25Gb Ethernet interfaces and two Nvidia BlueField-3 single-port 400 GbE DPUs or equivalent, and the "rack-scale" systems were said to have to "meet or exceed one integrated GB300 NVL72 rack-scale system or equivalent."

Whether these requirements have since been revised following the consultation period is unclear.

The RFI stated that the orders would be delivered to the FBI Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia.

The FBI has a number of data centers, including one in Pocatello, Idaho, known as "Grey Wolf."

Grey Wolf is the bureau's primary data center and was launched in 2019. In 2021, the FBI had five main data centers across the US; what the department's footprint looks like today is unclear.