NVIDIA and Lilly Announce Co-Innovation AI Lab to Reinvent Drug Discovery in the Age of AI
News Summary:
- NVIDIA and Lilly bring together a world-leading, multidisciplinary team of scientists, AI researchers and engineers to address the hardest problems in drug discovery.
- The co-innovation lab infrastructure will be built on the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform and the NVIDIA Vera Rubin architecture.
- NVIDIA and Lilly will pioneer robotics and physical AI to accelerate and scale medicine discovery and production.
SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 12, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference -- NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company today announced a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab focused on applying AI to tackle some of the most enduring challenges in the pharmaceutical industry.
The lab brings together Lilly's world-leading expertise in discovering, developing and manufacturing medicines with NVIDIA's leadership in AI, accelerated computing and AI infrastructure. The two companies will invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute over five years to support the new AI co-innovation lab.
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with top AI model builders and engineers from NVIDIA, allowing them to work side by side to generate large-scale data and build powerful AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using NVIDIA BioNeMo™ as the critical platform.
"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."
Building a Continuous Learning System for Drug Discovery
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.
Harnessing access to unprecedented compute for the industry, massive, high-quality data generation and NVIDIA BioNeMo as the platform to accelerate drug discovery, the teams will focus on building next-generation foundation and frontier models for biology and chemistry.
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.
The AI factory Lilly announced last fall, which is the most powerful in the pharmaceutical industry, will train large biomedical foundation and frontier models for identifying, optimizing and validating new molecules with exceptional speed and accuracy. It will also support new and advanced applications in manufacturing, medical imaging and scientific AI agents.
Beyond drug discovery, NVIDIA and Lilly will explore opportunities to apply AI across clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations to integrate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics and digital twins.
The use of physical AI and robotics in the AI factory will also help Lilly enhance its capacity to manufacture high-demand medications and strengthen supply chain reliability. With NVIDIA Omniverse™ libraries and NVIDIA RTX PRO™ Servers, Lilly can create digital twins of its manufacturing lines to model, stress test and optimize entire supply chains before making physical changes in the real world.
Supporting Global Leadership in Biomedical Discovery
NVIDIA leads in open-source AI, empowering companies with the models, data and tools needed to develop real-world AI systems. In addition, the NVIDIA Inception program provides startups with access to technical mentorship, as well as NVIDIA software and compute.
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 co-innovation lab will provide NVIDIA and Lilly's startup ecosystems and researchers with deep expertise and scale of computing resources.
The lab's work is expected to begin in South San Francisco early this year.
About Lilly
Lilly is a medicine company turning science into healing to make life better for people around the world. We've been pioneering life-changing discoveries for nearly 150 years, and today our medicines help tens of millions of people across the globe. Harnessing the power of biotechnology, chemistry and genetic medicine, our scientists are urgently advancing new discoveries to solve some of the world's most significant health challenges: redefining diabetes care; treating obesity and curtailing its most devastating long-term effects; advancing the fight against Alzheimer's disease; providing solutions to some of the most debilitating immune system disorders; and transforming the most difficult-to-treat cancers into manageable diseases. With each step toward a healthier world, we're motivated by one thing: making life better for millions more people. That includes delivering innovative clinical trials that reflect the diversity of our world and working to ensure our medicines are accessible and affordable. To learn more, visit Lilly.com and Lilly.com/news, or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
About NVIDIA
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) is the world leader in AI and accelerated computing.
For further information, contact:
Janette Ciborowski
NVIDIA Corporation
+1-734-330-8817
[email protected]
Kristen Porter Basu
Lilly
+1-317-447-2199
[email protected]
Lilly Trademarks and Trade Names
All trademarks or trade names referred to in this press release are the property of the company, or, to the extent trademarks or trade names belonging to other companies are references in this press release, the property of their respective owners. Solely for convenience, the trademarks and trade names in this press release are referred to without the ® and ™ symbols, but such references should not be construed as any indicator that the company or, to the extent applicable, their respective owners will not assert, to the fullest extent under applicable law, the company's or their rights thereto. We do not intend the use or display of other companies' trademarks and trade names to imply a relationship with, or endorsement or sponsorship of us by, any other companies.
Lilly Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements (as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995) about Lilly's co-innovation lab with NVIDIA, the potential abilities, performance, applications, and outcomes from this collaboration, AI, the impact from Lilly's efforts on using AI to deliver medicines to patients and other initiatives and reflects Lilly's current beliefs and expectations. The words "will", "believe", "plan", "may", "could", "can", and similar expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements. However, as with any such undertaking, there are substantial risks and uncertainties in implementing technology and in the process of drug research, development, and commercialization. Among other things, there can be no guarantee that Lilly or NVIDIA will realize the expected benefits of the co-innovation lab or the AI investments and initiatives will achieve the results discussed in this release. For further discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ from Lilly's expectations, see Lilly's Form 10-K and Form 10-Q filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Except as required by law, Lilly undertakes no duty to update forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.
NVIDIA Forward-Looking Statements
Certain statements in this press release including, but not limited to, statements as to: AI transforming every industry, and nowhere being the potential for its impact more profound than in life sciences; through collaboration, NVIDIA and Lilly building a blueprint for the future of drug discovery — one where researchers can explore billions of possibilities in silico before a single experiment is run, and turn science into engineering; the benefits, impact, performance, and availability of NVIDIA's products, services, and technologies; expectations with respect to NVIDIA's collaboration with Lilly; expectations with respect to technology developments; and other statements that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, which are subject to the "safe harbor" created by those sections based on management's beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to management and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause results to be materially different than expectations. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially include: global economic and political conditions; NVIDIA's reliance on third parties to manufacture, assemble, package and test NVIDIA's products; the impact of technological development and competition; development of new products and technologies or enhancements to NVIDIA's existing product and technologies; market acceptance of NVIDIA's products or NVIDIA's partners' products; design, manufacturing or software defects; changes in consumer preferences or demands; changes in industry standards and interfaces; unexpected loss of performance of NVIDIA's products or technologies when integrated into systems; and changes in applicable laws and regulations, as well as other factors detailed from time to time in the most recent reports NVIDIA files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, including, but not limited to, its annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Copies of reports filed with the SEC are posted on the company's website and are available from NVIDIA without charge. These forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and speak only as of the date hereof, and, except as required by law, NVIDIA disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements to reflect future events or circumstances.
© 2026 NVIDIA Corporation. All rights reserved. NVIDIA, the NVIDIA logo, BioNeMo, NVIDIA Clara, NVIDIA Omniverse and NVIDIA RTX PRO are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. Other company and product names may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated. Features, pricing, availability and specifications are subject to change without notice.
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