NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are committing $1 billion to a joint AI research lab in the San Francisco Bay Area — a signal that AI is no longer just a supporting tool in drug development, but core infrastructure.
Announced alongside the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, the lab will run on NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin chips and bring researchers from both companies under one roof. The goal: generate proprietary data and train advanced AI models that could dramatically compress timelines for drug discovery and design.
What’s notable isn’t just the scale of investment, but the strategy. NVIDIA is positioning itself less as a vendor and more as a platform layer for biotech innovation — supplying open models, software, and compute that pharma companies can build on. Lilly, meanwhile, is doubling down on AI after already investing heavily in supercomputing capacity.
How this kind of deep integration reshapes R&D economics — and whether it becomes the new blueprint for pharma innovation — is the question worth watching.