AI year in review - University of Florida

AI year in review

With the University of Florida 2025-2026 academic year in the books, let's take a moment to reflect on how impactful this year truly was for artificial intelligence research and education across every discipline and major. UF began it's journey with AI six years ago and now proudly boasts over 200 AI-courses, 300 AI-focused faculty, and 14,000 students enrolled annually in AI courses. 71% graduates in the Spring 2026 Commencement cycle completed at least one AI course during their time at UF.

The Forbes New Ivies list named University of Florida in their top 10 public universities producing graduates most desired by employers, leading the nation in AI adoption and preparing students for the AI-driven workforce. "The UF program is a way of democratizing the benefits of AI," said Chris Malachowsky, alumnus and co-founder of NVIDIA who delivered the 2026 University-Wide Commencement address.

Since 2017, UF faculty and units received more than $511 million in AI research awards, while AI-enabled research grant support by HiPerGator increased 180% since 2022. In September 2025, the fourth generation installation of HiPerGator was completed, with over 1,500 students and 3,700 university faculty and staff actively using this state-of-the-art computational resource. HiperGator remains the fastest university-owned and operated AI supercomputer in the US, enabling $566 million of UF’s externally funded research awards in this last academic year.

The NaviGator AI gateway expanded, currently providing over 70 large language models for students, faculty and staff to safely use, including NVIDIA Inference Microservices (NIMs) for Meta’s Llama Mistral, OpenAI’s GPT and DALL-E, Google’s Gemini, Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion, and Anthropic’s Claude. Last year saw an increase to more than 30,800 unique users across the NaviGator AI suite.

As Florida's flagship university, UF influences how other universities begin to think about AI, develop curriculum, introduce AI to their students, and how they make facilities available to researchers. The Center for Teaching Excellence’s Interface Teaching Conference heavily focused on artificial intelligence in teaching and learning practices. While technology is changing rapidly, UF is setting the pace for AI around every corner of campus and beyond.