NVIDIA and Eli Lilly Launch AI Co-Innovation Lab for Drug Development

Eli Lilly and Co. and NVIDIA have announced a partnership to establish a San Francisco-based AI co-innovation lab designed to accelerate drug discovery and development through advanced artificial intelligence technologies. The initiative, unveiled during the JPM Healthcare Conference, will involve an investment of up to $1 billion over five years, covering infrastructure, workforce expansion, and computing resources.

The lab will be located in South San Francisco and is expected to begin operations early this year. It will bring together Lilly biologists, scientists, and medical experts with NVIDIA AI model builders and engineers. The joint teams will focus on applying NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform to enhance multiple stages of pharmaceutical research, with an emphasis on improving the speed and efficiency of drug development.

The collaboration aims to address persistent challenges in the pharmaceutical industry by integrating Lilly’s experience in discovering, developing, and manufacturing medicines with NVIDIA’s AI software and high-performance computing capabilities. A central objective of the partnership is the creation of a continuous learning system that links Lilly’s laboratory experimentation with computational modeling environments. By connecting agentic wet labs with AI-driven dry labs, the companies intend to enable continuous, around-the-clock experimentation in biology and chemistry, where experimental data and AI models iteratively inform one another.

Beyond early-stage drug discovery, the partners have indicated plans to explore broader applications of AI across clinical development, commercial operations, and manufacturing processes. According to the companies, this approach could support more informed decision-making and operational efficiency across the pharmaceutical value chain.

“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, said in a statement. “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.”

The announcement follows a series of related collaborations involving NVIDIA in the life sciences sector. Earlier this week, NVIDIA revealed a partnership with Thermo Fisher Scientific to integrate AI into research equipment and experimental manufacturing, with the goal of reducing manual tasks in experimental design and data interpretation. In addition, Lilly and NVIDIA previously disclosed plans to build a dedicated supercomputer to support large-scale data ingestion, AI model training, and high-volume inference for drug discovery and manufacturing applications.