Nvidia and U.S. drugmaker Eli Lilly will invest $1 billion over five years to establish a joint research laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, the companies announced on Monday. The facility will run on Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin AI chips and is aimed at accelerating drug discovery and development.
The announcement, made at the opening of the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, follows Lilly’s recent plan to build a supercomputer powered by more than 1,000 of Nvidia’s current-generation Grace Blackwell chips. Like many pharmaceutical companies, Lilly is increasingly turning to advanced AI systems to speed up the design and testing of new medicines and shorten time-to-market.
The companies did not disclose whether Nvidia’s investment would flow directly to Lilly for the purchase of its chips, an arrangement that has previously drawn scrutiny in similar partnerships.
Nvidia said its broader biotechnology strategy centers on providing open-source AI models and software that drugmakers can integrate into their own research platforms using Nvidia hardware. On Monday, the chipmaker also unveiled several new AI models, including an upgraded tool designed to ensure AI-generated drug candidates can be realistically manufactured in laboratories.
Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, Kimberly Powell, said both companies are committing additional resources to the new site, with its exact location to be announced in March. Researchers from Nvidia and Lilly will work together at the facility to generate new data for training biotech-focused AI models.
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