NVIDIA, Eli Lilly Build $1 Bn AI Lab to Bring Drug Discovery into the AI Era

At the core of the collaboration is a “scientist-in-the-loop” approach that connects physical wet labs with computational dry labs, where AI models can analyze and refine data around the clock.

NVIDIA and Eli Lilly have announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation laboratory in Silicon Valley, committing up to $1 billion over five years to apply AI across drug discovery, development, and manufacturing.

The facility, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has been designed to bring pharmaceutical scientists and AI engineers into the same workspace, enabling continuous collaboration between biology, chemistry and advanced computing.

The partnership builds on a relationship announced last year, when the two companies revealed plans to deploy what they described as the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company.

That system, located at Lilly’s headquarters, Indianapolis, Indiana, USA, is intended to train large biomedical AI models capable of identifying and optimizing drug candidates.

The new lab extends this effort by embedding NVIDIA’s AI expertise directly into Lilly’s research workflows, aligning laboratory experimentation with real-time AI analysis.

“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.”

At the core of the collaboration is a “scientist-in-the-loop” approach that connects physical wet labs with computational dry labs. Experiments carried out by biologists and chemists will continuously generate data, which AI models can analyze and refine around the clock.

These insights can then guide the next set of experiments, creating a feedback loop intended to accelerate learning and improve decision-making across the drug discovery pipeline. The work will rely heavily on NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform, along with next-generation computing architectures such as NVIDIA Vera Rubin.

“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.”

Beyond discovery, the collaboration will explore how AI can be applied to clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations. NVIDIA and Lilly plan to use AI-driven robotics and digital twins to simulate and optimize manufacturing lines and supply chains before making physical changes.

Technologies such as NVIDIA Omniverse and RTX PRO Servers will enable virtual stress testing of production systems to improve efficiency and reliability for high-demand medicines.

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