Ginkgo Bioworks secured a four‑year, $47 million contract to design and deliver an automated phenotyping platform for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory. The system will automate growth, cultivation, sample prep and analytics across plate readers, imaging, flow cytometry and mass spectrometry to generate datasets for AI training. Ginkgo said the platform will support microbial and microbiome research for the Department of Energy and accelerate access to high‑quality biological phenotyping at scale. The contract underscores continued demand for industrialized lab automation to feed machine‑learning models and speed translational research.