Dunia Innovations today announced plans for Berlin GigaLab: a 6,000 m², €280 million facility designed to discover and develop advanced materials at industrial scale.
Siemens, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA, AWS and ILS will provide core technology.
Dunia Innovations is an AI-driven materials company building autonomous infrastructure to discover, develop, and validate advanced materials at industrial scale.
Founded in 2022, Dunia's platform integrates AI, lab automation, and simulation into a closed-loop system serving customers in catalysts, batteries, and semiconductors. The company's first-generation platform launched in 2023, and its second-generation IRIS platform went live in May 2025.
GigaLab will integrate autonomous experimentation, AI-guided design, digital simulation, and industrial-grade characterisation into a single closed-loop platform serving customers across strategically important sectors, including energy storage, catalysis, semiconductors, clean manufacturing, and critical raw material substitution.
The facility is expected to create over 200 direct jobs and begin operations in 2028.
As AI models propose millions of novel material candidates, the bottleneck is shifting from discovery to verification.
The published scientific record is too fragmented and sparse to train the large-scale models now reshaping other domains, and simulation alone has consistently failed to predict how materials behave under real-world conditions of temperature, pressure, and contamination.
Closing this gap requires a new kind of infrastructure: facilities purpose-built to generate structured, multimodal, industrially relevant data at a scale no academic laboratory can match.
According to Dr Alex Hammer, CEO and Co-Founder of Dunia Innovations:
“With AI already dreaming up millions of new materials, the demand for experimental verification is exploding. We need factories that do science at industrial scale.
GigaLab will be the first facility of its kind to do exactly that, removing material bottlenecks in frontier technologies.”
Backed by an industrial consortium of deep domain expertise
To deliver GigaLab, Dunia is assembling an industrial consortium with deep expertise across simulation, robotics, cloud computing, and laboratory infrastructure:
- Siemens — Digital twin and process simulation technology.
- ABB Robotics — Lab automation for fully autonomous experimentation.
- AWS — Cloud data infrastructure and large-scale analytics.
- NVIDIA — High-performance computing for AI model training via its Inception programme.
- ILS — Advanced high-throughput parallel testing equipment.
- Merck — Industry interest in GigaLab's capabilities to accelerate next-generation semiconductor materials.
Dunia believes GigaLab is strategically relevant to European competitiveness, sustainability and sovereignty, and expects the project to attract significant public co-investment alongside venture capital and industrial partners. Dr Dirk Demuth, Head of Corporate Development, Dunia Innovations ·
Co-founder and former CEO of hte GmbH shared:
“I spent twenty years at hte building the industry standard for high-throughput experimentation in the chemicals sector, and I've watched a generation of attempts to bring AI into materials R&D come and go; going all the way back to when we called it ‘in-silico chemistry’.
What's different about Dunia is the seriousness of the integration — we're building AI, automation, and industrial-grade workflow design all together from the ground up, not bolting them onto each other.
The Berlin GigaLab is the natural next step, and is exactly the kind of infrastructure industries around Europe and the world have been waiting for.”
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