NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company said they will jointly invest up to $1 billion over five years to launch a new AI co-innovation lab aimed at tackling persistent bottlenecks in pharmaceutical R&D, from early discovery through development and, longer term, manufacturing and supply chain optimization. The companies unveiled the initiative around the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, positioning the effort as a combined push to pair Lilly’s drug discovery, clinical, and manufacturing expertise with NVIDIA’s accelerated computing stack and life sciences AI platforms.
The lab will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is expected to begin work in South San Francisco early this year. It will co-locate Lilly scientists and domain experts in biology and medicine with NVIDIA AI researchers and engineers to generate large-scale biomedical datasets and build new models intended to improve the speed and accuracy of molecule identification, optimization, and validation. The effort will be built on NVIDIA BioNeMo, with the companies also planning to incorporate next-generation NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform.
At the core of the collaboration is an initial plan to create a “continuous learning system” that links agentic wet labs with computational dry labs in a 24/7 loop. Under this scientist-in-the-loop framework, automated experimentation and data generation would feed model training and refinement, with model outputs then informing subsequent experiments—an approach the companies say could compress iteration cycles and scale discovery workflows beyond what is practical with traditional, sequential lab processes.
The partners also outlined ambitions that extend beyond early-stage discovery. Over time, the companies plan to explore broader deployment of multimodal AI, agentic systems, robotics, and digital twins across clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations. Lilly said physical AI and robotics could help expand manufacturing capacity for high-demand medicines while improving supply chain resilience. The companies pointed to simulation and digital twin tooling—using NVIDIA Omniverse libraries and NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers—as a way to model and stress test manufacturing lines and end-to-end supply chains before implementing changes in physical facilities.
The initiative builds on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer program, which the company has described as an “AI factory” designed to train large biomedical foundation and frontier models. In addition to discovery use cases, Lilly said the compute infrastructure is intended to support applications spanning manufacturing, medical imaging, and scientific AI agents.
The collaboration is also expected to interface with each company’s broader ecosystem efforts. NVIDIA highlighted its open-source AI posture and its Inception program for startups, while Lilly pointed to its TuneLab platform, which provides select access to Lilly models for drug discovery derived from proprietary datasets. The companies said future TuneLab workflows are expected to incorporate NVIDIA Clara open foundation models for life sciences.
KEY QUOTES:
“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences. 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.”
Jensen Huang, Founder and CEO, NVIDIA
“For nearly 150 years, we’ve been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients. 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.”
David A. Ricks, Chair and CEO, Eli Lilly and Company
