On Feb. 17, 2026, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) announces it has joined collaborators across the nation to develop and deploy artificial intelligence to vastly accelerate the speed of discovery for science, energy and national security. 

The Genesis Mission, led by DOE for the nation, brings together all 17 DOE national laboratories in a race to harness AI for national priorities. PNNL is key to the effort, leading and participating in projects central to the nation’s security and international competitiveness. As a multi-disciplinary laboratory with a workforce addressing many types of scientific questions, PNNL brings a valued and unique wide-angle lens to the Genesis AI landscape.

“The Genesis Mission represents a pivotal moment of profound national purpose, where the brightest minds across DOE’s national labs, industry and academia are coming together to redefine the boundaries of scientific discovery,” said Laboratory Director Deb Gracio. “At PNNL, we are seizing this opportunity to shape the future of science with urgency and determination.”

At its core, the Genesis Mission is assembling a unified scientific workhorse powered by DOE-funded supercomputers, integrated AI systems and emerging quantum technologies. Few people realize that DOE manages some of the most advanced scientific instruments in the world. But until now, those instruments operated in silos at individual laboratories. The Genesis Mission connects both the instruments and their terabytes of data to an intelligent agentic platform not only capable of interpreting the data rapidly and proposing new experiments but also interpreting data streams from multiple instruments much faster, more efficiently and at lower cost than currently possible. Working together, the instruments, robotic automation and AI-powered analysis form the integrated infrastructure expected to compress years of painstaking work into months, weeks or even hours.

Researchers will draw on the resources from across the DOE laboratories, including the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science national user facility located on the PNNL campus. EMSL is home to the newly commissioned Anaerobic Microbial Phenotyping Platform (AMP2), which has opened a new chapter in autonomous biological discovery by giving researchers the speed and scale needed to accelerate biotechnology discovery. Scientists will use AMP2 to explore questions about anaerobic microorganisms, which are organisms that grow in an oxygen-free environment and that play important roles in industrial processes to make chemicals, fuels and biomaterials. 

As part of this effort, PNNL researchers will work toward creating the ultimate translation system for instruments and data sources that currently don’t speak the same language. 

Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle and supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy. The Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.