The U.S. Department of Energy has selected 278 research projects to accelerate scientific discovery using artificial intelligence, marking the largest federal funding response in DOE history. The Genesis Mission, announced today, represents a historic shift in how American science gets done, combining AI, supercomputing, and robotics to compress discovery timelines from decades to months.

This isn't just another research initiative. The scale is unprecedented. The DOE received applications from across all 50 states, and the selected projects span 342 participating institutions, including 16 national laboratories, 142 universities, 157 companies, and 13 nonprofit organizations. The largest single award is a three-year, $60 million investment in nuclear energy that will use AI to help deliver nuclear facilities faster and safer while cutting operating costs.

What Does This Mean for Materials Science and Discovery?

Two institutions are emerging as anchors for this new research infrastructure. Carnegie Mellon University's AI Science Foundry has been selected as a node in the NSF's Programmable Cloud Laboratory (PCL) Testbed and will receive up to $20 million over four years to help establish a national network of AI-enabled laboratories. Meanwhile, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will lead 13 Genesis Mission projects and collaborate on more than 30 others, with research spanning critical minerals, materials, manufacturing, fusion, and energy.

The Carnegie Mellon facility represents a fundamentally different approach to research. Rather than scientists conducting experiments one at a time through traditional trial-and-error methods, the Foundry combines artificial intelligence, robotics, automation, advanced scientific instrumentation, and high-performance computing into a single intelligent system. At its core is an autonomous platform that connects more than 80 robotically controlled instruments spanning biology, chemistry, and materials science across two cloud labs into a unified cybersecure platform.

"The AI Science Foundry represents a new paradigm for scientific research. By integrating artificial intelligence with robotics, autonomous laboratories, advanced instrumentation and high-performance computing, we're creating an intelligent research environment where scientists can ask bigger questions, explore vastly larger experimental spaces and dramatically shorten the path from idea to discovery," said Theresa Mayer, vice president for research at Carnegie Mellon.

Theresa Mayer, Vice President for Research at Carnegie Mellon University

The Foundry will initially support AI-guided research in functional polymers for data centers and robotics, microbial biomaterials for sustainable pigments, organoids for personalized medicine, and high-temperature aluminum alloys for next-generation aircraft engines. But the facility is designed as an open platform that can support a broad range of scientific disciplines and applications.

How Will These AI Systems Actually Speed Up Discovery?

• Autonomous Design-Test-Learn Cycles: AI agents can continuously design experiments, execute them across dozens of interconnected instruments, analyze results, and improve approaches without waiting for human intervention between steps, potentially reducing discovery timelines from decades to years or even months.
• Physics-Informed Predictions: Berkeley Lab projects will use AI powered by physics simulations to model excited states and identify promising quantum and optoelectronic materials, accelerating research for future computing, sensing, and energy technologies.
• High-Throughput Synthesis and Analysis: Researchers will combine AI structure prediction, high-throughput synthesis, and advanced microscopy to accelerate the optimization and design of complex concentrated alloys for extreme environmental applications.
• Cloud-Based Research Workflows: The Agentic HPC Pipeline Initiative will build AI workflows that enable U.S. manufacturers to run powerful Department of Energy research codes on commercial cloud platforms, democratizing access to advanced computational tools.

Berkeley Lab Director Kathy Yelick emphasized the broader impact of this approach. "By developing advanced AI tools and combining them with high-quality datasets and high-performance computing, our researchers are maximizing their scientific impact and speeding up discovery," she stated. "Beyond that, the Genesis Mission is also an opportunity to pioneer better AI tools and approaches for all of science, which will bring payoffs for generations to come".

Kathy Yelick

"By developing advanced AI tools and combining them with high-quality datasets and high-performance computing, our researchers are maximizing their scientific impact and speeding up discovery," said Kathy Yelick, director of Berkeley Lab.

Kathy Yelick, Director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

What Research Areas Are Getting Priority Funding?

The 278 selected projects address some of the nation's most pressing energy, scientific, and engineering challenges. Berkeley Lab's 13 lead projects span multiple critical domains:

• Energy and Water Security: AI systems will predict water supplies for energy infrastructure with novel precision, forecast precipitation to protect hydropower generation and grid stability, and develop highly accurate prediction systems for water availability to meet energy demands.
• Materials and Manufacturing: Autonomous laboratories will accelerate materials discovery, AI will optimize recovery of critical minerals from copper, molybdenum, platinum, chrome, and nickel deposits, and researchers will develop AI-assisted 3D geological models for subsurface nuclear waste storage.
• Advanced Energy Systems: Physics-informed digital twins will establish credible paths toward reliable operation of high-temperature superconducting magnets for compact magnetic confinement fusion power plants, and AI will improve prediction of subsurface fractures for geothermal and other energy technologies.
• Nuclear Innovation: The HERALD project will build an AI platform to vet decades of secure government research, unlocking it for commercial industry to accelerate nuclear innovation.

Carnegie Mellon is also leading three Genesis Mission projects beyond its Foundry role, with significant participation in projects nationwide. The university's facility will expand opportunities for researchers, students, educators, and industry professionals through workshops, hands-on training, and AI-guided educational programs that provide experience with autonomous experimentation, robotics, data science, and artificial intelligence.

Secretary of Energy Chris Wright framed the announcement as validation of American scientific strength. "America has no shortage of bold ideas or talented scientists, and the response to the Genesis Mission proves that," he stated. "The 278 projects selected today represent the very best of our nation's scientific enterprise. The remarkable number of high-quality proposals we received demonstrates that America's innovation pipeline is strong, and it points to even greater opportunities for future investment and continued expansion of the Genesis Mission portfolio".

The Phase 1 Genesis Mission projects will focus on identifying promising pathways toward transformative scientific capabilities and establishing a foundation for future investment and scale. Project teams will design and demonstrate research workflows that integrate AI with scientific investigation, while rigorously evaluating whether those approaches can accelerate discovery, improve predictive capabilities, enhance experimentation, or generate new scientific insights.

Awardees will gain access to the Genesis Mission Platform, including AI agent frameworks, advanced AI models and software made available through industry partners, and high-performance computing resources across DOE's National Laboratories and partner facilities. This shared infrastructure is designed to enable researchers to rapidly design, test, and refine new approaches to accelerate scientific discovery across institutions and disciplines.