Nvidia and Eli Lilly invest $1 billion in joint research lab to transform AI drug discovery

Nvidia, Eli Lilly to spend $1 billion over five years on joint research lab

SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 12 (Reuters) - Nvidia (NVDA.O), opens new tab and U.S. pharma giant Eli Lilly (LLY.N), opens new tab will spend $1 billion building a new joint research lab in the San Francisco Bay area over five years which will use Nvidia's newest generation Vera Rubin AI chips, the firms said on Monday. The announcement at the start of a weeklong JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco comes just months after Zepbound maker Lilly said it is building a supercomputer using more than 1,000 of Nvidia's current generation Grace Blackwell AI chips. Lilly is among a raft of drugmakers that are increasingly relying on sophisticated AI models to both design and discover new treatments, with the goal of slashing the time it takes to get new offerings to market. The pharma group and Nvidia, the world's most valuable listed firm, did not say whether Nvidia cash would flow to Lilly and be used to buy Nvidia chips, a circular arrangement that has raised questions about other Nvidia investments. Nvidia's strategy in the biotechnology market is to supply open-source AI models and software that drugmakers can then use to build their own drug development platforms using Nvidia's hardware. The company on Monday released a raft of new models, including an updated one for ensuring that drugs designed with AI tools are practical to synthesize in real-world labs. In a press briefing, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare Kimberly Powell said both firms were dedicating "incremental resources" to a new facility whose location will be announced in March, where researchers from Nvidia and Lilly will work side by side to generate new data to train biotechnology AI models. Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jan Harvey Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

NVIDIA and Lilly Announce Co-Innovation AI Lab to Reinvent Drug Discovery in the Age of AI

Companies to Jointly Invest up to $1 Billion Over Five Years in Infrastructure and Research * NVIDIA and Lilly bring together a world-leading, multidisciplinary team of scientists, AI researchers and engineers to address the hardest problems in drug discovery. * The co-innovation lab infrastructure will be built on the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform and the NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture. * NVIDIA and Lilly will pioneer robotics and physical AI to accelerate and scale medicine discovery and production. J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference -- NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company today announced a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab focused on applying AI to tackle some of the most enduring challenges in the pharmaceutical industry. The lab brings together Lilly's world-leading expertise in discovering, developing and manufacturing medicines with NVIDIA's leadership in AI, accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. The two companies will invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute over five years to support the new AI co-innovation lab. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with top AI model builders and engineers from NVIDIA, allowing them to work side by side to generate large-scale data and build powerful AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using NVIDIA BioNeMo™ as the critical platform. "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." "For nearly 150 years, we've been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients," said David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly. "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. By bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, we're creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone." Building a Continuous Learning System for Drug Discovery The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly's agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This scientist-in-the-loop framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another. Harnessing access to unprecedented compute for the industry, massive, high-quality data generation and NVIDIA BioNeMo as the platform to accelerate drug discovery, the teams will focus on building next-generation foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry. The new initiative expands on Lilly's previously announced AI supercomputer and intends to harness investments in next-generation NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin. The AI factory Lilly announced last fall, which is the most powerful in the pharmaceutical industry, will train large biomedical foundation and frontier models for identifying, optimizing and validating new molecules with exceptional speed and accuracy. It will also support new and advanced applications in manufacturing, medical imaging and scientific AI agents. Beyond drug discovery, NVIDIA and Lilly will explore opportunities to apply AI across clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations to integrate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics and digital twins. The use of physical AI and robotics in the AI factory will also help Lilly enhance its capacity to manufacture high-demand medications and strengthen supply chain reliability. With NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries and NVIDIA RTX PRO™ Servers, Lilly can create digital twins of its manufacturing lines to model, stress test and optimize entire supply chains before making physical changes in the real world. Supporting Global Leadership in Biomedical Discovery NVIDIA leads in open-source AI, empowering companies with the models, data and tools needed to develop real-world AI systems. In addition, the NVIDIA Inception program provides startups with access to technical mentorship, as well as NVIDIA software and compute. Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform, provides biotech companies with access to select Lilly models for drug discovery built on decades of Lilly's proprietary data. TuneLab will include NVIDIA Clara™ open foundation models for life sciences as part of a future workflow offering. The co-innovation lab will provide NVIDIA and Lilly's startup ecosystems and researchers with deep expertise and scale of computing resources. The lab's work is expected to begin in South San Francisco early this year.

Nvidia, Eli Lilly to spend $1 billion over five years on joint research lab

Nvidia and US pharma giant Eli Lilly will spend $1 billion building a new joint research lab in ⁠the San Francisco Bay area over five years which will use Nvidia's newest generation Vera Rubin AI chips, the firms said on Monday. Nvidia and US pharma giant Eli Lilly will spend $1 billion building a new joint research lab in ⁠the San Francisco Bay area over five years which will use Nvidia's newest generation Vera Rubin AI chips, the firms said on Monday. The announcement at the start of a weeklong JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco comes just months after Zepbound maker Lilly said it is building a supercomputer using more than 1,000 of Nvidia's current generation Grace Blackwell AI chips. Lilly is among a raft of drugmakers that are increasingly relying on sophisticated AI models to both design and discover new treatments, with the goal of slashing the time it takes to get new offerings to market. The pharma group and Nvidia, the world's most valuable listed firm, did not say whether Nvidia cash would flow to Lilly and be used to buy Nvidia chips, a circular arrangement that has raised questions about other Nvidia investments. Nvidia's strategy in the biotechnology market is to supply open-source AI models and software that drugmakers can then use to build their own drug development platforms using Nvidia's hardware. The company on Monday released a raft of new models, including an updated one ⁠for ensuring that ⁠drugs designed with AI tools are practical to synthesize in real-world labs. In a press briefing, Nvidia's vice president of healthcare Kimberly Powell said both firms were dedicating "incremental resources" to a new facility whose location will be announced in March, where researchers from Nvidia and Lilly will work side by side to generate new data to train biotechnology AI models.

Nvidia and Lilly form $1 billion AI partnership for drug discovery By Investing.com

SAN FRANCISCO - Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Eli Lilly and Company announced today a five-year, $1 billion partnership to establish an artificial intelligence co-innovation laboratory focused on accelerating drug discovery and development. Nvidia, with its massive $4.47 trillion market capitalization and "GREAT" financial health score according to InvestingPro, continues to expand its AI leadership beyond its core semiconductor business. The company's strong financial position enables these significant long-term investments in healthcare AI applications. The collaboration, unveiled at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, will bring together Lilly's pharmaceutical expertise with Nvidia's AI capabilities to address challenges in medicine development. The new lab, to be located in the San Francisco Bay Area, will co-locate Lilly scientists with Nvidia AI engineers to develop foundation models for biology and chemistry using the Nvidia BioNeMo platform and next-generation Vera Rubin architecture. "By bringing together world-class talent in a startup environment, we're creating the conditions for breakthroughs that neither company could achieve alone," said David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly. The partnership will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system connecting Lilly's wet labs with computational facilities to enable 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation. This framework aims to accelerate the identification and optimization of new drug molecules. Beyond drug discovery, the collaboration will explore AI applications across clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations, including the use of robotics and digital twins to optimize production lines. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, stated, "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." The initiative builds upon Lilly's previously announced AI supercomputer, which the company describes as the most powerful in the pharmaceutical industry. Work at the co-innovation lab is expected to begin in South San Francisco early this year, according to the press release statement. With Nvidia's stock receiving a strong consensus recommendation of 1.33 from analysts (where 1 is a Strong Buy), investors appear confident in the company's expanding AI ecosystem across industries like healthcare. InvestingPro offers 15+ additional insights on Nvidia's financial health, valuation metrics, and growth potential to help investors make more informed decisions. In other recent news, Eli Lilly and NVIDIA have announced a significant collaboration to establish an artificial intelligence co-innovation lab for drug discovery, with an investment of up to $1 billion over five years. This partnership will leverage NVIDIA's advanced computing, AI, and robotics capabilities alongside Lilly's drug discovery expertise. Additionally, NVIDIA has been actively involved in other ventures, such as supporting Nscale, which is in talks for a $2 billion funding round. Nscale is working with Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase to manage this fundraising effort. In the realm of stock analysis, Baird has reiterated an Outperform rating for NVIDIA, highlighting the company's strong position in the AI ecosystem. Piper Sandler also reiterated an Overweight rating for NVIDIA, naming it the top large-cap data center pick for the year due to its technological leadership and strategic partnerships. Furthermore, Archer Aviation has announced plans to integrate NVIDIA's advanced AI computing platform into its aircraft systems to develop next-generation AI technologies. This partnership is aimed at enhancing pilot safety and building autonomy-ready flight controls for Archer Aviation's aircraft. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.

Nvidia, Eli Lilly to Launch AI-Powered Co-Innovation Lab

Nvidia and Eli Lilly are partnering to launch a co-innovation lab to use Nvidia's artificial-intelligence and robotics expertise for drug discovery. The companies said Monday they would invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure, and computing power, including Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, over the next five years. They said the new lab would expand the buildout of Lilly's Nvidia DGX SuperPOD and AI factory. "We see this as a catalyst for the capabilities that will define the next era of drug discovery," Lilly Chief Information and Digital Officer Diogo Rau said. "We're moving toward a future where discovery is driven by rapid experimentation and increasingly customized models -- an approach that reflects our commitment to leading applied AI in drug discovery and investing deeply in new forms of data generation and model development." Nvidia also said it was collaborating with Thermo Fisher to automate the company's research labs and data analysis. Write to Elias Schisgall at [email protected]