Nvidia and Eli Lilly commit $1 billion to build AI lab that could reinvent drug discovery

Reviewed byNidhi Govil

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Nvidia and Eli Lilly announced a $1 billion investment over five years to establish a co-innovation AI lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. The facility will combine Lilly's pharmaceutical expertise with Nvidia's AI capabilities to accelerate drug discovery through foundation models and continuous learning systems. The lab will use Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips and BioNeMo platform to enable 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation.

Nvidia and Eli Lilly Launch Joint Research Lab for AI Drug Discovery

Nvidia and Eli Lilly unveiled plans to invest up to $1 billion over five years in a co-innovation AI lab that aims to transform how pharmaceutical companies discover and develop new medicines

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. Announced at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference on Monday, the collaboration brings together the world's most valuable listed firm with one of the pharmaceutical industry's leading players to tackle some of the most challenging problems in medicine development

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. The facility, set to open later this year in South San Francisco, will co-locate Lilly's top biologists and chemists alongside Nvidia's software engineers and AI model developers

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Source: NVIDIA

Source: NVIDIA

Building a Continuous Learning System for Drug Discovery

The AI medical research lab will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system for drug discovery that connects Lilly's agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation

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. This scientist-in-the-loop framework will allow experiments, data generation, and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another. According to Nvidia, when scientists go home for the evening, compute resources can continue preparing for the next day's experiments—essentially creating a continuous integration pipeline for AI-assisted drug research

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. "AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "Nvidia and Lilly are bringing together the best of our industries to invent a new blueprint for drug discovery—one where scientists can explore vast biological and chemical spaces in silico before a single molecule is made"

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Source: SiliconANGLE

Source: SiliconANGLE

Leveraging Vera Rubin Chips and BioNeMo Platform

The joint research lab will harness Nvidia's newly unveiled Vera Rubin compute platform, which promises a fivefold increase in performance over Nvidia's prior-generation Grace Blackwell GPUs

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. These AI chips, announced at CES last week, aren't expected to be available in significant numbers until the second half of this year, suggesting the lab will be among the first to access this cutting-edge hardware

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. The infrastructure will be built on Nvidia's BioNeMo platform, an open-source framework introduced in fall 2022 for building and training deep learning models for use in AI drug discovery

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. Teams will focus on building next-generation foundation models for drug discovery in biology and chemistry, leveraging unprecedented compute power and massive, high-quality data generation

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Source: ET

Source: ET

Expanding Beyond Drug Discovery to Manufacturing and Operations

While AI in the pharmaceutical industry applications for drug discovery remain the primary focus, researchers will also explore how AI can optimize clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations

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. Lilly is investigating Nvidia's Omniverse Robotics platforms and digital twins to optimize its manufacturing plants and increase production of high-demand drugs

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. The use of physical AI and robotics in the AI factory will help Lilly enhance its capacity for manufacturing optimization and strengthen supply chain reliability

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. This isn't Lilly's first major investment in accelerated computing—at GTC DC last October, the pharmaceutical giant revealed it had deployed a Blackwell Ultra-based SuperPOD with 1,016 B300 GPUs to support its exploration into computational biology and chemistry

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Supporting the Broader Biotechnology Ecosystem

The $1 billion investment extends beyond the two companies' immediate needs. Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform, will provide biotechnology companies with access to select Lilly models for drug discovery built on decades of proprietary data

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. The platform will include Nvidia Clara open foundation models for life sciences as part of a future workflow offering

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. "Combining our volumes of data and scientific knowledge with Nvidia's computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it," said David Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly. "By bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, we're creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone"

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. Nvidia's vice president of healthcare, Kimberly Powell, confirmed that both firms are dedicating incremental resources to the new facility, with its specific location to be announced in March

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. The collaboration positions both companies to accelerate drug discovery timelines and potentially slash the years it takes to bring new treatments to market, addressing a critical need in life sciences as drugmakers increasingly rely on sophisticated AI models to design and discover new therapies.

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