NVIDIA and Lilly Launch $1 Billion AI Drug Discovery Lab

NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company have announced the creation of a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab designed to apply artificial intelligence to some of the most persistent challenges in the pharmaceutical industry. The collaboration brings together Lilly’s long-standing expertise in drug discovery, development, and manufacturing with NVIDIA’s leadership in AI, accelerated computing, and AI infrastructure.

Under the agreement, the two companies plan to invest up to $1 billion over five years in talent, infrastructure, and computing resources to support the new lab. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the facility will co-locate Lilly scientists specializing in biology, chemistry, and medicine with NVIDIA AI engineers and model builders. By working side by side, the teams aim to generate large-scale, high-quality data and develop advanced AI models capable of significantly accelerating medicine development. NVIDIA BioNeMo™ will serve as the core platform underpinning the lab’s efforts.

Executives from both companies highlighted the transformative potential of AI in life sciences. NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said the collaboration represents a new blueprint for drug discovery, enabling scientists to explore vast biological and chemical spaces computationally before moving into physical experimentation. Lilly chair and CEO David A. Ricks emphasized that combining Lilly’s deep scientific knowledge and proprietary data with NVIDIA’s computational power could fundamentally reinvent how new medicines are discovered.

Initially, the lab will focus on building a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly’s experimental “wet labs” with computational “dry labs.” This scientist-in-the-loop framework is designed to support round-the-clock, AI-assisted experimentation, allowing data generation, experiments, and model development to continuously inform one another. The teams will leverage unprecedented compute capacity and next-generation NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin, to build advanced foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry.

Beyond drug discovery, the collaboration will explore AI applications across clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations. Technologies such as agentic AI, robotics, multimodal models, and digital twins will be used to optimize manufacturing and strengthen supply chain resilience. Using NVIDIA Omniverse™ and RTX PRO™ Servers, Lilly plans to simulate and optimize manufacturing lines before implementing changes in the real world.

The co-innovation lab, expected to begin work in South San Francisco early this year, also aims to support startups and researchers by providing access to deep expertise and large-scale computing resources, reinforcing global leadership in biomedical discovery.