Nvidia to invest $1 billion with Eli Lilly to build AI-driven drug lab

Nvidia Corp. plans to invest $1 billion over five years in a new laboratory with Eli Lilly & Co., aiming to speed up the use of artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry.

 

The facility will be built in Silicon Valley and bring Lilly’s lab expertise closer to the center of artificial intelligence innovation, Nvidia said on Monday. The company described the project as a joint investment, without elaborating on the financial terms.

 

The hope is to supercharge a time-consuming process that currently relies heavily on human researchers conducting physical experiments.

 

The investment is the latest example of Nvidia using its newfound financial might to cultivate fresh markets for its products. The company — the world’s most valuable corporation — dominates the market for artificial intelligence accelerators, the chips that help develop and run AI models. But a small handful of giant tech customers account for much of its revenue.

   

Nvidia sees health care and the pharmaceutical industry as areas that could benefit from its technology. Already, companies are beginning to use AI computers to come up with promising ideas for new drugs or compounds. But they still typically have to verify the findings with experiments in labs. Nvidia argues that AI can automate much of that effort.

 

“Humans are the primary constraint on the speed of labs,” said Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care.

 

The joint lab will help AI engineers learn what it takes to run lab equipment and research tasks. They’ll then help the drug company fine-tune computers and software to take on some of the jobs normally performed by people.

 

Beyond the lab, Nvidia is expanding its suite of AI models and agents tailored for the health care industry and making them open source. That means anyone can tinker with the technology and adapt it to their needs.

 

The company is also working with Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. to connect laboratory equipment to Nvidia’s DGX Spark AI computer. That will allow for automated control of lab activity. And it’s collaborating with Multiply Labs to teach robots about research procedures, planning for the day when facilities can be fully automated.

 

The partnership with Nvidia puts Lilly at the forefront of AI-enabled drug discovery, which is still in its early stages and has yet to yield any major breakthroughs.

 

The accord builds on an earlier announcement from the companies, which teamed up in October to build the “most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company.” That machine, housed at Lilly’s Indianapolis headquarters, will be fully operational in the first quarter.

 

Lilly employees will work alongside Nvidia staffers enabling “seamless collaboration and access to world-class scientific and technical talent,” a spokesperson for Lilly said in a statement. The innovation lab will initially be focused on drug discovery and AI model development, the company said.