Press release · Administration
The Silicon Highway solicitation: Pax Silica opens its first program competition.
The State Department posts the first funding opportunity in the framework's history — the Pax Silica Artificial Intelligence Assistance Project, approximately $50 million to build a trusted-shipment corridor, Panama first, applications due August 20.
This NOFO seeks to fund the establishment of a Silicon Highway: a digital-physical corridor that accelerates logistics and compliance operations among partner countries with cryptographic cargo verification, AI-expedited risk assessment, and pre-approved expedited processing early in the supply chain.
A notice of funding opportunity is not an award, and this one says so plainly — subject to the availability of funds, one to three cooperative agreements, awards from one million to fifty million dollars. But it is the first executed solicitation in Pax Silica's history, and it supplies what no declaration can: a concrete program, a way to apply, and a clock. Applications close August 20. The pilot launches through Panama, with a second phase envisioned across the coalition's membership.
A framework organized around the Indo-Pacific placed its first program competition in the Western Hemisphere, through the jurisdiction where American backing is already being stress-tested by Chinese economic retaliation. The hemisphere was the argument for where the doctrine could prove itself fastest. With this posting, it is where the doctrine's first competition is actually running.