Accelerating computational materials discovery with artificial intelligence and cloud high-performance computing: from large-scale screening to experimental validation

High-throughput computational materials discovery has promised significant acceleration of the design and discovery of new materials for many years. Despite a surge in interest and activity, the constraints imposed by large-scale computational resources present a significant bottleneck. Furthermore, examples of large-scale computational discovery carried through experimental validation remain scarce, especially for materials with product applicability. Here we demonstrate how this vision became reality by first combining state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) models and traditional physics-based models on cloud high-performance computing (HPC) resources to quickly navigate through more than 32 million candidates and predict around half a million potentially stable materials. By focusing on solid-state electrolytes for battery applications, our discovery pipeline further identified 18 promising candidates with new compositions and rediscovered a decade's worth of collective knowledge in the field as a byproduct. By employing around one thousand virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud, this process took less than 80 hours. We then synthesized and experimentally characterized the structures and conductivities of our top candidates, the Na$_x$Li$_{3-x}$YCl$_6$ ($0 < x < 3$) series, demonstrating the potential of these compounds to serve as solid electrolytes. Additional candidate materials that are currently under experimental investigation could offer more examples of the computational discovery of new phases of Li- and Na-conducting solid electrolytes. We believe that this unprecedented approach of synergistically integrating AI models and cloud HPC not only accelerates materials discovery but also showcases the potency of AI-guided experimentation in unlocking transformative scientific breakthroughs with real-world applications.