Ai2 Launches OlmoEarth Platform for Planetary-Scale Geospatial Inference

The OlmoEarth Platform has been introduced by the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) as a robust infrastructure for executing geospatial foundation models on a planetary scale. This platform facilitates the transition of models from fine-tuning to extensive inference while tackling issues related to data acquisition, preprocessing, and postprocessing. It organizes tasks into three phases—data acquisition and preprocessing (CPU), inference (GPU), and postprocessing (CPU)—with each phase optimized for specific hardware. Capable of conducting continent-scale inference in about a day, it processes numerous terabytes of imagery at a minimal cost per square kilometer. Utilizing a custom metadata index to streamline external STAC APIs, it also accommodates windowed reads from cloud-optimized formats. The platform automatically provisions virtual machines for tasks and manages failures seamlessly. Ai2's future plans include automated model executions, change detection alerts, agentic tools, enhanced models, diverse modalities, embeddings, and multi-cloud capabilities. Currently, the platform operates on Google Cloud but is built for versatility across various environments.