Powering American Science: LILA to join DOE's Genesis Mission

LILA is proud to announce that we've been selected to join the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission - a national effort to mobilize AI, supercomputing, and the DOE's 17 National Laboratories to double the pace of American scientific discovery. Three proposals submitted across Genesis Mission’s Lighthouse Challenges have been selected for Phase I awards, each in partnership with a national laboratory or leading research university.

The Mission

Announced by the DOE in 2026 and led by Under Secretary for Science Dario Gil, the Genesis Mission is building what the Department has called the most complex and powerful scientific instrument ever created: an integrated discovery platform connecting the nation's supercomputers, AI systems, and quantum capabilities to the instruments and expertise inside the National Labs. The goal is to tackle a set of national science and technology challenges - from advanced manufacturing to autonomous laboratories - faster than has ever been possible, securing American leadership in energy, science, and national security along the way.

That mission aligns in many ways with LILA's. We're building our AI Science Factories to run the full scientific method autonomously - generating hypotheses, designing and executing experiments, and learning from the results in real time - because we believe the bottleneck in scientific progress is no longer human insight, it's the speed at which ideas can be tested against reality. The Genesis Mission is a bet that AI can compress that cycle at a national scale. It's the exact problem LILA was built to solve. The chance to pair our platform with the instruments, data, and domain expertise inside the National Labs is a natural extension of our work.

The News: Three Lighthouse Projects

Each of LILA's selected projects pairs our AI reasoning platform with a national lab or university partner to demonstrate measurable "AI advantage" against a real scientific challenge, as part of the Genesis Mission's Lighthouse Challenge program.

AI-Enabled Electrochemical Refinery with Caltech and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

‍This project will seek to build an autonomous, closed-loop electrocatalytic discovery platform - an "electrochemical refinery" - that can navigate more than 10 billion possible combinations of feed gases, electrolytes, and operating conditions to convert waste carbon into valuable chemical products. LILA's AI will be trained on both computational and experimental data to co-optimize for product selectivity, efficiency, and durability, demonstrating that an AI agent can outperform conventional trial-and-error experimentation in this space. Success here would demonstrate a generalizable blueprint for AI-directed catalyst discovery; one that could be redeployed across the critical chemical transformations important to US. Energy and manufacturing competitiveness.

Agentic AI-Driven Manufacturing of Polyethylene from Waste Carbon with Northwestern University and Argonne National Laboratory.

This project targets a more energy and atom-efficient route to one of the world's highest-volume chemicals: polyethylene. Today, it's made primarily through energy-intensive steam cracking. This project will use LILA's reasoning-and-planning AI to coordinate a tandem process - electrochemically converting captured carbon into ethylene, then thermochemically upgrading it to polyethylene - reasoning across both stages at once to find combinations no human-guided workflow has efficiently discovered.

Autonomous Identification of Semiconductor Charge Transport Physics with the National Laboratory of the Rockies .

This project pairs LILA's AI with NLR's autonomous synthesis and characterization instruments to rewrite the physics governing how wide-band gap semiconductors like ZnO and AlN fail. Using a multi-agent AI system, the project aims to separate true physical phenomena from measurement artifacts across more than 1,000 samples and generate new, testable equations for leakage current and breakdown - physics that today still relies on decades-old empirical approximations. The results could lead to more reliable, higher-performing power electronics for AI data centers and beyond.

Why This Matters

Each of these projects sits at the intersection of two things LILA believes are foundational to the next decade of science: the deep, hard-won expertise inside America's universities and national laboratories, and an AI system built specifically to reason scientifically rather than simply predict. Partnering directly with Caltech, LBNL, Northwestern, Argonne, and NLR gives us the chance to demonstrate that advantage on problems that matter - manufacturing, materials, and the physics underneath the electronics that power everything from the grid to AI infrastructure itself.

What's Next

These three awards are just the beginning of LILA's involvement in the Genesis Mission. We'll work with our university and national lab partners for several months to develop concepts. Successful Phase I teams then have the opportunity to apply for larger Phase II awards to build and deploy. We're grateful to our partners at Caltech, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Northwestern University, Argonne National Laboratory, and the National Laboratory of the Rockies, and we look forward to sharing what we build together.

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