Key Takeaways
- NVIDIA and Lilly will jointly invest up to $1 billion in AI research to develop biomedical-based models and scale AI across the pharmaceutical business.
- The lab will accelerate experiments and molecular discoveries by connecting wet and dry laboratories in a continuous AI learning loop.
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NVIDIA and Eli Lilly announced a joint AI Co-Innovation Lab and invested up to $1 billion over five years to accelerate drug discovery and pharmaceutical innovation.
Located in South San Francisco, the lab combines Lilly’s pharmaceutical R&D expertise with NVIDIA’s AI and computing infrastructure to build next-generation foundational models using NVIDIA BioNeMo™.
This initiative will co-locate domain scientists and AI engineers to build a continuous learning system that connects Lilly’s wet and dry labs for 24/7 AI-enabled experiments. The goal is to use large-scale data and computing to shorten drug development cycles and improve molecular identification and validation.
NVIDIA founder Jensen Huang called the lab a “blueprint for drug discovery” that will help scientists explore the vast chemical space in silico. Lilly CEO David Ricks said the partnership allows the company to “reinvent drug discovery” by combining Lilly’s proprietary data with NVIDIA’s model-building capabilities.
This collaboration expands on Lilly’s previous investments in AI, including the launch of an AI factory and supercomputer. The lab leverages the NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture and uses digital twins, robotics, and agent AI to optimize manufacturing, supply chain, and clinical operations.
Lilly’s TuneLab platform integrates the NVIDIA Clara™ open foundation model for biotech partners, while NVIDIA’s Inception program supports ecosystem startups with access to computational and technical guidance.