Nvidia partners with Lilly to launch $1B AI drug discovery lab

AI chip giant Nvidia and pharma titan Eli Lilly announced today that the two will invest up to $1 billion over five years to support a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab in the San Francisco Bay area.

The new facility will bring together Lilly's scientists and NVIDIA's AI engineers to build large datasets and powerful AI models that can speed up the drug research and development process using NVIDIA's BioNeMo platform, the companies say.

"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 founder and CEO of NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, said in the joint press release.

The joint lab, set to open at an undisclosed location in South San Francisco by late March, will use the newest generation of Nvidia's Vera Rubin AI chips.

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

This announcement comes after Lilly announced last fall its plans to build a supercomputer to accelerate drug discovery and shorten the development cycle using more than 1,000 of Nvidia's current-generation Blackwell Ultra graphics processing units.

Eli Lilly is just one of the many drug companies looking to AI as a way to reduce the time it takes to bring new treatments to the market. Other drugmakers, including Pfizer, have also invested heavily in AI over the years to speed up drug development.

Alivia Kaylor is a scientist and the senior site editor of Pharma Life Sciences.