The National Science Foundation announced funding for 20 new cloud laboratories on July 22, 2026, including $17 million for a Caltech-led automated facility called ELECTRA (Electron Diffraction Cloud Laboratory for Research and Autonomy). Led by chemistry professor Hosea Nelson with AI co-investigators Katie Bouman and Yisong Yue, ELECTRA will let researchers and AI agents run remote experiments using microcrystal electron diffraction (microED) to determine the 3D structure of small molecules, with data stored and shared online. Nelson says the goal is to cut structure determination to under a minute and to generate the large chemistry datasets currently lacking for training models comparable to LLMs or AlphaFold. Partners include UCLA, Colorado State, Harvard and the University of Michigan. The award addresses the Genesis Mission challenge "Achieving AI-driven Autonomous Laboratories," which the White House declared a national effort on the same date.