NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company have announced a $1 billion, five-year commitment to establish a joint artificial intelligence research laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, underscoring the growing role of advanced computing in pharmaceutical innovation. The facility will operate on NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin AI chips and is aimed at accelerating drug discovery by enabling deeper collaboration between AI researchers and life sciences experts.
The partnership was unveiled at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference and comes amid a broader push by pharmaceutical companies to adopt large-scale AI infrastructure. The announcement follows Eli Lilly’s recent disclosure that it is building a supercomputer powered by more than 1,000 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell AI chips, reflecting the company’s strategy to embed high-performance AI systems across its research and development operations.
At the new joint lab, researchers from NVIDIA and Lilly will work in close proximity to generate high-quality, proprietary datasets that can be used to train biotechnology-focused AI models. The goal is to improve the speed and accuracy with which potential drug candidates are identified, simulated and optimized before entering costly and time-intensive laboratory and clinical testing phases. By combining NVIDIA’s AI hardware and software expertise with Lilly’s deep domain knowledge in drug development, the collaboration aims to shorten development timelines and increase the probability of successful therapies.
NVIDIA Vice President of Healthcare Kimberly Powell said both organisations are dedicating “incremental resources” to the centre, signalling a long-term commitment beyond existing investments. She added that the exact location of the facility will be announced in March. The lab will also serve as a proving ground for NVIDIA’s expanding portfolio of healthcare-focused AI tools, including newly launched open source models designed to make AI-generated drug candidates easier to synthesize in real-world laboratory settings.
The collaboration reflects a broader shift in the pharmaceutical industry, where AI is increasingly used not only for data analysis but as a core engine for discovery. High-performance computing enables researchers to model complex biological systems, predict molecular interactions and generate novel compounds at a scale previously impossible.
For NVIDIA, the partnership strengthens its position as a critical technology provider to the life sciences sector, extending the reach of its latest AI chips into one of the most data-intensive industries. For Eli Lilly, the joint lab represents a strategic investment in next-generation R&D capabilities, reinforcing its ambition to integrate AI deeply into the future of drug discovery and development.
