NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company are teaming up to build a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab aimed at tackling some of the pharmaceutical industry’s toughest challenges, the companies have announced.
The partnership brings together Lilly’s deep expertise in drug discovery, development and manufacturing with NVIDIA’s dominance in AI, accelerated computing and infrastructure. The companies plan to invest up to $1 billion over five years in talent, computing power and infrastructure to fuel the effort.
The lab will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Lilly biologists, scientists and medical experts will work side by side with NVIDIA AI researchers and engineers. Together, they will generate massive datasets and build advanced AI models designed to dramatically speed up medicine development, using NVIDIA BioNeMo as the core 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 volume 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.”
The collaboration will initially focus on building a continuous learning system that tightly links Lilly’s physical “wet labs” with AI-powered “dry labs.” The goal is round-the-clock, AI-assisted experimentation, where laboratory work, data generation and model development constantly feed and improve one another in a scientist-in-the-loop framework.
With access to unprecedented computing power, large-scale high-quality data and NVIDIA BioNeMo, the teams will develop next-generation foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry.
The initiative builds on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer and will incorporate next-generation NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin.
Lilly’s AI factory — unveiled last fall and described as the most powerful in the pharmaceutical industry — will train large biomedical models to identify, optimize and validate new molecules with exceptional speed and precision. The system will also support advanced applications in manufacturing, medical imaging and scientific AI agents.
The companies plan to expand AI across clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations, integrating multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics and digital twins.
Physical AI and robotics are expected to help Lilly scale production of high-demand medicines and strengthen supply chain reliability. Using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers, Lilly will create digital twins of its manufacturing lines to simulate, stress-test and optimize supply chains before making changes in the real world.
NVIDIA’s open-source AI leadership and its Inception startup program will support the broader ecosystem around the lab, offering models, tools, mentorship and computing resources. Lilly TuneLab, the company’s AI and machine learning platform, will provide biotech firms access to select Lilly drug-discovery models built on decades of proprietary data, with plans to integrate NVIDIA Clara life sciences foundation models into future workflows.
The co-innovation lab is expected to begin work in South San Francisco early this year, positioning NVIDIA and Lilly at the center of a rapidly accelerating push to use AI to reshape how medicines are discovered, developed and delivered.
