New Delhi: NVIDIA and Eli Lilly have announced a deep AI partnership that aims to change how new medicines are discovered and made. The two companies will jointly invest up to $1 billion over the next five years to build a new AI focused research lab in the San Francisco Bay Area. The announcement was made during the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference and has already drawn attention across the tech and pharma sectors.
Big pharma has been talking about AI for years. This move feels more concrete. Lilly brings decades of drug discovery data and lab experience. NVIDIA brings chips, AI platforms, and scale. Together, they want to shorten the long road from idea to medicine, a process that often takes more than a decade.
A joint AI lab focused on drug discovery
The new co-innovation lab will bring scientists from Lilly and AI engineers from NVIDIA into one shared space. According to the companies, the lab will be built on the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform and future NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture.
Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said, “AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences.” He added that the partnership creates “a new blueprint for drug discovery.”
Lilly chair and CEO David A. Ricks linked the effort to the company’s long history. “For nearly 150 years, we’ve been working to bring life changing medicines to patients,” he said, adding that combining Lilly’s data with NVIDIA’s compute “could reinvent drug discovery as we know it.”
How AI will be used inside the lab
The lab will focus on building a continuous learning system. This connects real world wet labs with AI driven dry labs, allowing experiments and models to inform each other round the clock.
Key areas include
- AI models for biology and chemistry
- Faster testing of new molecules before physical trials
- Robotics and physical AI in manufacturing
Lilly has already said it is building a powerful AI factory using more than 1,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell chips. The new lab extends that effort and will also explore digital twins of factories using NVIDIA Omniverse tools.
Why this matters for healthcare and AI
Drugmakers are under pressure to cut costs and speed up research. AI promises that, though results take time. NVIDIA’s healthcare VP Kimberly Powell said both firms are committing “incremental resources” to a shared facility where teams will work side by side.
The lab is expected to begin work in South San Francisco early this year.