NVIDIA and Lilly have launched an AI lab to apply AI and accelerated computing to core pharmaceutical challenges. The initiative combines Lilly’s drug discovery, development, and manufacturing expertise with NVIDIA’s AI infrastructure and high-performance computing. The two companies plan to invest up to $1 billion over five years in talent, infrastructure, and compute to support AI-driven pharmaceutical research and production.
The AI lab will bring Lilly’s biology, science, and medical experts alongside NVIDIA AI engineers in the San Francisco Bay Area. By working in the same location, the teams will develop AI models to accelerate medicine development, with NVIDIA BioNeMo as the primary 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 partners plan to connect Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs through a single learning system. This setup supports round-the-clock AI-assisted experimentation, creating a feedback loop in which scientists, data, and AI models improves research results.
The teams plan to develop foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry, drawing on large-scale compute, high-quality data generation, and NVIDIA BioNeMo as the platform to accelerate drug discovery.
The new initiative expands on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer and intends to harness investments in NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin.
Eli Lilly’s AI factory is designed to train biomedical foundation and frontier models for accurate molecule discovery and validation. The system will also enable use cases across manufacturing, medical imaging, and scientific AI agents.
NVIDIA and Lilly plan to extend AI beyond drug discovery into clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations. The scope spans multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics, and digital twins.
Physical AI and robotics will help Lilly scale medication production while improving supply chain reliability. Using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and NVIDIA RTX PRO servers, Lilly can simulate manufacturing lines and supply chains, test changes virtually, and optimize operations before deployment.
Supporting Global Leadership in Biomedical Discovery
Through its open-source AI efforts, NVIDIA supplies companies with the models, data, and tools needed for production AI systems. The NVIDIA Inception program extends this support to startups by offering mentorship, software, and access to compute.
Lilly TuneLab provides biotech companies with access to select Lilly drug discovery models trained on proprietary data. The AI and machine learning platform plans to add NVIDIA Clara open foundation models for life sciences as part of a future workflow.
The lab will provide startups and researchers across NVIDIA and Lilly’s ecosystems access to expertise and computing resources.
Source: NVIDIA
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, designs and manufactures graphics processing units, systems on chips, networking hardware, and AI intelligence software such as CUDA. Its products serve industries including gaming, data centers, autonomous vehicles, professional visualization, robotics, health care, and energy. The company introduced the GPU in 1999 and later expanded into accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. In gaming, its GPUs support high-performance rendering, while in AI and high-performance computing, its systems provide the infrastructure for training and deploying large-scale models. NVIDIA also develops tools for robotics and autonomous driving.
About Lilly
Eli Lilly is a global pharmaceutical company that discovers, develops, manufactures, and sells prescription medicines for human health. Its products address diseases in diabetes, oncology, immunology, neuroscience, and cardiovascular care. The company serves hospitals, pharmacies, health systems, managed care organizations, and pharmaceutical distributors. It also supports clinicians and researchers involved in clinical development and patient care. Lilly was founded in 1876 by Col. Eli Lilly. Its headquarters are in Indianapolis, IN. The company operates research, manufacturing, and commercial facilities across North America, Europe, and Asia. Lilly sells medicines in more than 125 countries worldwide. The company employs about 47,000 people globally. Its workforce includes scientists, engineers, clinicians, manufacturing staff, and commercial teams. Lilly conducts internal research and works with external partners across the life sciences sector. The company distributes medicines through supply chains that support national health systems and private healthcare providers.