The National Science Foundation has announced the program that GEMSTONE is part of: a $400 million investment — $380 million from NSF, with $20 million in philanthropic matching funds from the Astera Institute — in twenty teams establishing a nationwide network of AI-enabled automated laboratories.
The NSF PCL Test Bed (Toward a Network of Programmable Cloud Laboratories), aligned with the U.S. government’s Genesis Mission, aims to test, scale, and demonstrate methods that advance automated science and engineering — from hypothesis generation through autonomous experimentation to data interpretation — while enhancing reproducibility, reusability, and open science practices.