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

News Summary:

• 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.