Ginkgo Bioworks secured a four‑year, $47 million contract with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to design and integrate a high‑throughput automated phenotyping platform for DOE microbial research—covering cultivation, sample preparation and analytics for BSL‑2 workflows. Separately, BioNexus raised $500 million to expand manufacturing and testing capacity, reflecting investor appetite to back lab scale and commercial testing infrastructure. Both deals underline industry emphasis on automation, data generation for AI/ML training, and expanded capacity to support therapeutics, diagnostics and microbiome research. For practitioners: investments in automation are being framed as essential to reduce bottlenecks in reproducible high‑volume biological data generation.