Dunia Innovations Launches Berlin GigaLab for Industrial-Scale Science

Dunia Innovations, an AI-driven materials company, has announced plans for the Berlin GigaLab, a cutting-edge 6,000 square meter facility with a €280 million investment. The GigaLab's primary objective is the discovery and development of advanced materials at an industrial scale, an initiative aimed at transforming the research and development process in critical sectors such as energy storage, catalysis, semiconductors, and clean manufacturing.

Founded in 2022, Dunia Innovations has rapidly developed a platform that integrates AI, lab automation, and simulation into a closed-loop system. Following the launch of its first generation in 2023, the second-generation IRIS platform went live in May 2025, laying the groundwork for the ambitious GigaLab project. This new facility is projected to create over 200 direct jobs and is expected to commence operations in 2028, solidifying Berlin's position as a hub for technological innovation.

Addressing the Bottleneck in Materials Discovery

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence has enabled the proposal of millions of new material candidates, but this has shifted the bottleneck from discovery to experimental verification. The core issue lies in the fragmented and sparse nature of published scientific data, which is insufficient for training large-scale models, and the inability of simulations alone to accurately predict material behavior under real-world conditions of temperature, pressure, and contamination.

To bridge this gap, a new type of infrastructure is required: facilities purpose-built to generate structured, multimodal, industrially relevant data at a scale that traditional academic laboratories cannot match. The Berlin GigaLab addresses this need by integrating autonomous experimentation, AI-guided design, digital simulation, and industrial-grade characterization into a single closed-loop platform. This approach is crucial for accelerating innovation in strategic sectors and overcoming current limitations in materials research.

An Industrial Consortium for Technological Excellence

To deliver the GigaLab, Dunia Innovations has assembled an industrial consortium boasting deep domain expertise across simulation, robotics, cloud computing, and laboratory infrastructure. Key partners include Siemens, which will provide digital twin and process simulation technology, and ABB Robotics, responsible for lab automation for fully autonomous experimentation. NVIDIA will contribute its High-Performance Computing (HPC) solutions for AI model training via its Inception program, while AWS will manage cloud data infrastructure and large-scale analytics. ILS will supply advanced high-throughput parallel testing equipment, and Merck has expressed industry interest in GigaLab's capabilities to accelerate next-generation semiconductor materials.

This collaboration among technology and industry leaders is crucial to ensure the GigaLab can operate with maximum efficiency and precision, providing a robust environment for materials research and development. The integration of these diverse competencies exemplifies how complex innovation challenges require a multidisciplinary approach and a solid infrastructural foundation, often with an emphasis on on-premise or hybrid deployments to maintain control over critical data and processes.

Strategic Implications and Future Outlook

Dunia Innovations believes the GigaLab holds significant strategic relevance for European competitiveness, sustainability, and sovereignty. The company anticipates the project will attract substantial public co-investment alongside venture capital and industrial partners. As Dr. Alex Hammer, CEO and Co-Founder of Dunia Innovations, emphasized, the demand for experimental verification is exploding, and “factories that do science at industrial scale” are needed to remove material bottlenecks in frontier technologies.

Dr. Dirk Demuth, Head of Corporate Development and Co-founder of hte GmbH, added that Dunia's difference lies in 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.” This integrated approach is precisely what industries across Europe and the world have been waiting for. For companies evaluating on-premise deployments for AI/LLM workloads, the GigaLab represents a model of investment in dedicated infrastructure that prioritizes control, data sovereignty, and the ability to generate proprietary insights—aspects that AI-RADAR thoroughly analyzes in its frameworks on /llm-onpremise for evaluating self-hosted versus cloud trade-offs.