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

Nvidia 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. The company described the project as a joint investment, without elaborating on the financial terms. The investment is the latest example of Nvidia using its newfound financial might to cultivate fresh markets for its products.

“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.”

The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This scientist-in-the-loop framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another.

The new initiative expands on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer and intends to harness investments in next-generation NVIDIA architectures, including NVIDIA Vera Rubin.