Berlin's Dunia Innovations commits 280M to an autonomous AI-materials GigaLab

Dunia Innovations plans a 6,000-square-metre, €280m autonomous R&D facility in Berlin called GigaLab to discover and develop advanced materials at industrial scale. The facility is supported by Siemens, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA, AWS, and ILS, and is expected to create over 200 direct jobs, beginning operations in 2028. Dunia builds an integrated closed-loop platform combining AI, lab automation, and simulation for customers in catalysts, batteries, and semiconductors. The company argues that the scientific record is too fragmented for large-scale model training and that simulation alone cannot reliably predict real-world material behavior under temperature, pressure, and contamination. GigaLab targets the physical experimental-verification bottleneck created by AI-driven materials generation.

"Dunia Innovations , the Berlin-based deeptech company building autonomous infrastructure for materials R&D, announced plans on Wednesday for a 6,000-square-metre, €280m facility in Berlin called GigaLab, designed to discover and develop advanced materials at industrial scale. Siemens, ABB Robotics, NVIDIA, AWS and ILS will provide core technology. The facility is expected to create over 200 direct jobs and begin operations in 2028."

"GigaLab is the company's bet that the next bottleneck in frontier materials discovery is not algorithmic but physical: the experimental-verification capacity needed to validate the millions of candidate materials AI models are now generating. Dunia's core argument, as laid out by chief executive and co-founder Dr Alex Hammer in the announcement, is that the published scientific record is too fragmented to train the large-scale models reshaping other domains, and that simulation alone has failed to predict how materials behave under real-world conditions of temperature, pressure and contamination."

"With AI already dreaming up millions of new materials, the demand for experimental verification is exploding,' Hammer said. 'We need factories that do science at industrial scale. GigaLab will be the first facility of its kind to do exactly that.'"

"Founded in 2022, Dunia operates an integrated platform that combines AI, lab automation and simulation into a closed-loop system serving customers in catalysts, batteries and semiconductors. The first-generation platform launched in 2023; the second-generation IRIS platform went live in May 2025."

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