At a Glance
- Companies: Eli Lilly and Company; NVIDIA
- Location: San Francisco Bay Area, USA
- Deal value: Up to $1bn joint investment over five years in talent, infrastructure and compute
- Focus area: AI models for biology/chemistry; drug discovery, clinical development, manufacturing
- Next steps: Co‑locate scientists and engineers; launch early 2026 using NVIDIA BioNeMo and Vera Rubin
What happened?
Eli Lilly and NVIDIA have unveiled a first‑of‑its‑kind AI co‑innovation lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a joint five‑year investment of up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute to accelerate drug discovery and development. Announced at the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, the lab will integrate Lilly’s biology experts with NVIDIA’s AI engineers.
Why does it matter?
The facility aims to create continuous learning systems linking wet labs with computational models, enabling 24/7 AI‑assisted experimentation to explore biological/chemical spaces in silico before synthesis. This could shorten timelines, reduce costs and unlock new molecules for diseases like diabetes, obesity and Alzheimer’s, building on Lilly’s existing AI supercomputer with 1,000+ GPUs.
Who’s behind it?
Lilly brings decades of proprietary data and scientific expertise across chronic diseases. NVIDIA provides accelerated computing, BioNeMo platform for biomedicine and next‑gen architectures like Vera Rubin for frontier models.
How was it achieved?
The lab will pioneer robotics, physical AI and multimodal models in a scientist‑in‑the‑loop framework, extending beyond discovery to clinical trials, manufacturing and operations. It expands Lilly’s TuneLab (sharing models via NVIDIA Clara) and NVIDIA Inception for startups.
What’s next?
Operations start early 2026 in South San Francisco, generating data and models to reinvent R&D workflows. NVIDIA’s Thermo Fisher autonomous lab partnership complements this push.
What are people saying?
Lilly CEO David Ricks said merging data/science with NVIDIA’s compute “could reinvent drug discovery”. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang called it a blueprint where scientists explore “billions of possibilities in silico”. Citi analysts see it “fundamentally transforming” discovery via converged expertise.