Nvidia, Lilly Team Up For $1B Drug AI Lab

• The co-innovation lab will use Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin chips and be built on its BioNeMo platform, while leveraging Lilly’s pharmaceutical expertise.
• Apart from drug discovery, the collaboration will also explore AI’s use in clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations that can integrate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics, and digital twins.
• The lab is expected to begin operations early this year.

Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Eli Lilly (LLY) announced on Monday that the two companies will jointly invest $1 billion over five years to build a new joint research lab in the San Francisco Bay area.

The co-innovation lab will leverage Nvidia’s new Vera Rubin chips and be built on the company’s BioNeMo platform, while leveraging Eli Lilly’s pharmaceutical expertise to accelerate medicine development, the companies said.

The lab will expand on the U.S. pharma giant’s previously-announced artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer and will use Nvidia’s next-generation architectures.

Apart from drug discovery, the collaboration will also seek to explore ways to use AI in clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations that can integrate multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics, and digital twins. The lab is expected to begin operations early this year.

Shares of NVDA were up 0.09% at the time of writing, while shares of LLY were up 0.79% at the same time.

Eli Lilly’s AI Push

Nvidia and Lilly’s joint announcement comes at the start of the 44th Annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco and follows the drugmaker’s announcement from October 2025 of launching a supercomputer, also leveraging 1,000 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra GPUs.

The supercomputer would power an AI factory or a specialized computing infrastructure to manage the entire AI lifecycle from data input and training to fine-tuning and high-volume inference, the company had announced then.

The AI factory will now be used to train large biomedical foundation and frontier models for identifying, optimizing and validating new molecules with exceptional speed and accuracy while also supporting advanced applications in manufacturing, medical imaging and scientific AI agents.

“For nearly 150 years, we’ve been working to bring life-changing medicines to patients,” David A. Ricks, chair and CEO of Eli Lilly said. “Combining our volume of data and scientific knowledge with NVIDIA’s computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it.”

Lilly’s competitor Novo Nordisk (NVO) has also been making a significant push into AI, partnering with major tech firms including Nvidia, Microsoft, and AWS across its value chain.

Nvidia’s Healthcare Market Exploration

Nvidia, the most valuable corporation in the world, has been exploring healthcare and pharmaceuticals as new markets for its AI chips.

Apart from the deal with Lilly, the semiconductor company also announced a collaboration with research company Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. (TMO) for manufacturing scientific instruments that are intelligent as well as autonomous labs.

Nvidia’s BioNeMo and NeMo platforms are also being adopted by other firms for biotech and drug discovery to power foundation models, AI-driven molecular design, and autonomous “AI scientist” systems as well as for robotics and lab automation to introduce simulation, and physical AI technologies.

“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” said Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s founder and CEO.

“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,” he said about the deal with Lilly.

How Did Stocktwits Users React?

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around NVDA shares were in the ‘extremely bullish’ territory over the past 24 hours amid ‘high’ message volumes at the time of writing.

Meanwhile, retail sentiment around LLY shares were ‘bullish’ at the same time with ‘high’ message volumes.

Shares of NVDA climbed over 38% in the past year while LLY shares rose over 34% in the same time.

For updates and corrections, email newsroom[at]stocktwits[dot]com.

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