Brian Buntz

Hyperscalers plan to spend around $700 billion in 2026 on capex. Of that, roughly $490 billion to $520 billion has been explicitly guided by Amazon ($200B), Alphabet ($175B–$185B), and Meta ($115B–$135B) for AI. The remainder reflects analyst estimates for Microsoft, which reported $37.5 billion in a single quarter. Alphabet is financing its spending with a…

General Motors’ battery team, led by Director of Battery R&D George Cintra, walked away from the 2025 R&D 100 Awards with two battery-related honors as part of GM’s broader haul of four R&D 100 Awards. At the gala, Cintra described the ultra-fast charger, the GM XFC Cell, as a step toward EV charging that feels…

The initial reaction across IP-sensitive industries was to slam the door. In early 2024, a ZoomRx survey found that 65% of the top 20 Big Pharmas had banned employees from using ChatGPT, largely relating to concerns that sensitive internal data could be leaked to competitors. That same year, some 83% of life sciences professionals surveyed…

Beyond the headline platform launches at SLAS 2026, a quieter wave of partnerships, reagent kits, and niche hardware targeted the unglamorous bottlenecks that slow drug discovery and lab operations. If you missed the bigger moves, see our coverage of the lab OS wars, ABB’s GoFa cobot lab workflows, Biosero’s GoSimple workcells and Green Button Go…

Biosero, part of the BICO Group and a provider of lab automation software and integration services, brought two announcements to SLAS 2026: a standardized workcell product line called GoSimple, and an assistive AI layer for its Green Button Go scheduling software. GoSimple is a pre-configured, automation-ready benchtop workcell designed to cut deployment time for common…

ABB Robotics used SLAS 2026 to make its case that industrial collaborative robots belong in the laboratory. The company demonstrated three GoFa cobot workcells running end-to-end analytical workflows alongside instruments from Agilent and Mettler Toledo, a deliberate show of multi-vendor interoperability. The demos covered real bench work: pipetting, solid dispensing, weighing, titration, UV-Vis analysis, filtration…

At SLAS 2026, three orchestration platforms launched in the same week, multiple instruments shipped with API-first positioning, and two vendors debuted competing target engagement assays head-to-head. The closed-loop lab is now a procurement fight. On February 5, Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI announced that GPT-5 had autonomously designed and iterated a large cell-free protein synthesis campaign…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) completed its roughly $18.8 billion combination with BD’s Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses on Feb. 9, 2026—and promptly watched its stock fall as much as 12% intraday to $335.86, recovering slightly to around $343 by midday. The selloff wasn’t about the deal structure or the standalone Waters results, both of which…

Waters Corp. (NYSE: WAT) said Feb. 9, 2026 that it has completed its combination with BD’s Biosciences & Diagnostic Solutions businesses, completing a tax-efficient Reverse Morris Trust transaction first announced in July 2025 and widely described as a roughly $17.5B deal. With the close, legacy Waters shareholders own about 60.8% of the combined company (fully…

Richard Tapper, an Associate Research Specialist at Dow who develops and tests fire-retardant wire and cable formulations, accepted the 2025 R&D Technician of the Year award at the R&D 100 Awards gala in Scottsdale, Arizona. Tapper’s work spans household wiring to grid-scale solar infrastructure, where he pushes halogen-free polymer composites through increasingly stringent burn tests.…

In 2018, a supermassive black hole about 665 million light-years away ripped a passing star apart. At the time, it was “the most boring, garden-variety event,” one researcher recalled. Years later, the same object, AT2018hyz, has become an extreme late-time radio source, with its 5–7 GHz flux climbing from about 1.4 mJy to 33.3 mJy…

By all accounts, December 29, 2008 was an unremarkable day at UCLA’s Molecular Sciences Building. Campus was mostly deserted for winter break. A few postdocs were catching up on benchwork. In a fourth-floor chemistry lab, 23-year-old research assistant Sheri Sangji drew tert-butyllithium, a chemical that ignites on contact with air, into a plastic syringe. The…

A collaboration between Ginkgo Bioworks and OpenAI has produced what may one of the most concrete demonstrations yet of AI-driven autonomous science: a closed-loop system in which OpenAI’s GPT-5 designed, executed, analyzed and iteratively refined 36,000 cell-free protein synthesis experiments over six months, with minimal human intervention. The system reduced the cost of producing superfolder…

Anthropic has dropped a new model. Opus 4.6, which can now ingest roughly 750,000 words of text in a single session and, more importantly,  actually use that context without the performance degradation that has plagued earlier models. Claude Opus 4.6, released February 5, scored 76% on a long-context retrieval benchmark where its predecessor managed just…

Thomas Lograsso, director of the Critical Materials Innovation Hub at Ames National Laboratory, accepted the 2025 R&D Leader of the Year award with a speech that emphasized collaboration and investing in the next generation. “Science thrives on openness and collaboration,” Lograsso said. “We must continue to invest in research, share knowledge freely, and empower the…

At Cisco’s AI Summit yesterday, OpenAI’s VP for AI and Science Kevin Weil made an extraordinary claim: AI could compress scientific progress by roughly 5x. “If we can truly accelerate science, if we can do the next 25 years of science in the next five years instead… we will be sitting there in 2030 with…

Regenity Biosciences is tackling a long-overlooked challenge in orthopedic medicine. In this R&D 100 Award-winning interview, Natsuyo Shishido Lee (Director of R&D) and Chris Harris (Senior Integration Engineer) discuss RejuvaKnee—a purified, intact bovine meniscus implant made entirely of collagen, designed for segmental defects after partial meniscectomy. With no durable standard of care for years, the…

After four years selling to pharma, co-founders Robert DiFazio and Juliana Hilliard are adding a new line of business: their own drugs. In 2006, a drug called TGN 1412 met every preclinical safety requirement. Clean in animal models. Clean in monkeys. Ninety minutes after six human volunteers received their first dose at a London hospital,…

Silicon Quantum Computing has built what is, in effect, a designer material you can dial like an instrument. Using scanning tunneling microscope lithography, the Sydney-based company patterned a two-dimensional lattice of roughly 15,000 atom-based quantum dots in silicon, arranged on a 100×150 grid. Results published in Nature show controlled simulation of quantum physics across arrays…

Check out our red carpet interview from the R&D 100 Awards below, where Derek Sokolowski, Product Manager Cell Culture at PHC Corp. of North America, shared the team’s excitement about their win and the science behind it. PHC’s winning product, LiCellMo, a live cell metabolic pathway analyzer, has a core focus: giving researchers continuous, non-disruptive…

NASA says its Perseverance rover has completed the first rover drives on another world planned with the help of AI-generated waypoint plans, a demonstration aimed at reducing the time human rover drivers spend mapping routes, as NASA noted. The demonstration involved two drives on the rim of Jezero Crater in December 2025. On Dec. 8,…

NVIDIA and Dassault Systèmes are building an industrial AI platform that combines NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure with Dassault’s virtual twin software. The partnership aims to speed materials discovery and drug development. The companies argue their “industry world models,” grounded in decades of engineering and scientific workflows rather than internet-scale text and video, can help predict real-world…

Visions of multi-planetary civilization accompanied Musk’s 12-year quest that led to the the SpaceX-xAI merge. Six weeks before announcing the SpaceX-xAI merger, Elon Musk sat in his Austin Gigafactory and explained why he’d reversed course on AI. “I finally came to the conclusion I can either be a spectator or a participant but I can’t…

Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon are reportedly in talks to inject as much as $60 billion into OpenAI as part of a potential up to $100 billion funding round, according to The Information. The deal could be among the largest private capital raises ever attempted, valuing OpenAI at up to $830 billion, according to the Wall…

At the 2025 R&D 100 Awards in Scottsdale, Arizona, we caught up with the National Energy Technology Laboratory team behind PLUS-Graphite. The technology converts polyethylene waste into high-performance synthetic graphite for lithium-ion batteries. Dr. Pangjali Mule, Ashra and Shinway represented NETL on the red carpet, where they reflected on what winning the “Oscar of Innovation”…