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Nvidia, Eli Lilly Commit Up to $1 Billion for Bay Area AI Drug Discovery Lab

The plan centers on a closed-loop system tying AI models to automated wet labs to generate high-quality training data.

Overview

  • The five-year partnership will establish a co-innovation facility in the San Francisco Bay Area to build biology and chemistry foundation models using NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform and next-generation Vera Rubin hardware.
  • The companies are targeting a late-March opening in South San Francisco, with the exact site to be announced in March.
  • Lilly scientists and NVIDIA engineers will co-locate to run a continuous learning loop that links computational modeling with automated wet-lab robotics to produce defensible “ground truth” datasets.
  • The remit extends beyond discovery to clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations, including work on digital twins and autonomous lab workflows with Thermo Fisher Scientific and Multiply Labs.
  • Operational specifics remain undisclosed, including financial flows and GPU counts, though the effort builds on Lilly’s in-house AI factory powered by more than 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs.