This Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) award funds the acquisition and deployment of Bison -- a GPU-accelerated high-performance computing system for computationally intensive and artificial intelligence (AI) research. Bison will transform the capabilities of North Dakota State University (NDSU) and of other institutions in the state of North Dakota to conduct leading-edge research which has implications in public policies, agriculture and food security, healthcare, energy, engineering, environment, quantum information science, among others. The new system will be a state-wide regional resource that provides faculty, staff, and students at all eleven institutions within the North Dakota University System and the five tribal colleges in North Dakota with needed infrastructure. Bison is crucial to the growing spectrum of research and training activities and will be used to foster collaboration with research and education partners within North Dakota and across the country, especially on AI research, and will thus contribute to efforts to democratize AI. The project will acquire, deploy, and operate a GPU-accelerated high-performance computing system architected for highly arithmetic-intensive and AI/machine learning processing. The instrument (Bison, named after the majestic American mammal) consists of a premier storage system built to support AI workflows and a GPU cluster for highly compute-intensive computation and AI training and inference tasks. At NDSU and fifteen