Nvidia and Eli Lilly and Company announced on Monday the launch of what they call a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab at the 44th J P Morgan Healthcare Conference, aimed at applying artificial intelligence (AI) to address long-standing challenges in pharmaceutical research and development.
Investment in Talent, Infrastructure, and Compute
The two companies said they will invest up to USD 1 billion over five years in talent, infrastructure, and computing resources to support the initiative, which will combine Lilly’s expertise in drug discovery, development, and manufacturing with Nvidia's leadership in AI, accelerated computing, and AI infrastructure.
Nvidia BioNeMo and Next-Generation AI Architectures
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will bring together Lilly scientists and domain experts in biology and medicine with Nvidia’s AI engineers and model builders. The teams will work side by side to generate large-scale biomedical data and develop powerful AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using Nvidia BioNeMo as the core platform.
The collaboration will initially focus on building a continuous learning system that connects Lilly’s laboratory experimentation with computational AI models, enabling round-the-clock, AI-assisted research. This scientist-in-the-loop approach is expected to allow experimental data and AI models to continuously inform and improve one another.
The initiative builds on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer and will leverage next-generation Nvidia architectures, including Nvidia Vera Rubin. Lilly's AI factory — described as the most powerful in the pharmaceutical industry — will be used to train large biomedical foundation and frontier models to rapidly identify, optimize, and validate new molecules with exceptional speed and accuracy. "It will also support new and advanced applications in manufacturing, medical imaging, and scientific AI agents," the joint statement added.
Expanding AI Beyond Discovery
Beyond drug discovery, the companies plan to explore the use of AI across clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations, including the application of robotics, digital twins, and multimodal AI models. Using Nvidia Omniverse libraries and RTX PRO servers, Lilly aims to create digital replicas (twins) of manufacturing lines to model, stress test, and optimize entire supply chains before making physical changes in the real world.
Supporting the Broader Biotech Ecosystem
The partnership will also support broader biomedical innovation through Nvidia's open-source AI ecosystem and startup programs, as well as Lilly’s TuneLab platform, which provides biotech companies access to select AI models for drug discovery.
"Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform, provides biotech companies with access to select Lilly models for drug discovery built on decades of Lilly’s proprietary data. TuneLab will include Nvidia Clara open foundation models for life sciences as part of a future workflow offering," the official release dated January 12, 2026, said.
The co-innovation lab is expected to begin operations in South San Francisco early this year, the companies said.
Leadership Quotes:
“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.”
“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.”
