Google’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) artificial intelligence unit, DeepMind, announced late on Wednesday that it will establish the first automated science laboratory in the U.K. next year, as part of a broader partnership with the country.
“A multidisciplinary team of researchers will oversee research in the lab, which will be built from the ground up to be fully integrated with Gemini,” DeepMind’s executives, including CEO Demis Hassabis, wrote in a blog post. “By directing world-class robotics to synthesize and characterize hundreds of materials per day, the team intends to significantly shorten the timeline for identifying transformative new materials.”
The company will focus on superconductors and new materials for advanced batteries, solar cells and semiconductors, DeepMind added.
As part of its partnership with the U.K., DeepMind said it would provide “priority access” to its AI for Science models to U.K. scientists, including AlphaEvolve (focusing on designing advanced algorithms), AlphaGenome (focuses on understanding DNA), AI co-scientists (acts as a virtual scientific collaborator) and WeatherNext (next-gen weather forecasting models).
DeepMind also said it would partner with the U.K. AI Security Institute “on critical safety research in explainability, alignment and societal impact, so these risks may be better understood and mitigated.”
“AI can also be a powerful defender against security risks,” DeepMind added. “We will work with the UK government to advance AI-enhanced approaches to national cyber resilience, exploring using tools like Big Sleep and CodeMender to identify vulnerabilities and automatically fix code, enabling a more secure future.”
DeepMind was founded in 2010 by Hassabis and acquired by Google in 2014 for a purchase price reported to be between $400M and $650M.
The announcement of the automated science laboratory in the U.K. comes just days after DeepMind said it would open an AI research lab in Singapore.
The unit has been instrumental in helping its parent company make AI-related breakthroughs, including September’s announcement of two AI models that allow robots to use the web to think, plan and make logical decisions inside their physical environments.