Lilly teams up with NVIDIA to build the strongest supercomputer and AI factory in the pharmaceutical industry: accelerating drug development and discovering molecules humans cannot find.
Eli Lilly and NVIDIA announced a collaboration to build the pharmaceutical industry's "most powerful" supercomputer and AI factory, aiming to accelerate drug development across the sector.
On Tuesday, the two companies announced that Eli Lilly expects to complete construction of the supercomputer and AI factory in December and launch operations in January next year. The system will be comprised of more than 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU chips, connected via a unified high-speed network.
The supercomputer will power the AI factory, which is a computing infrastructure specially designed for the large-scale development, training, and deployment of AI models for drug R&D.
However, Eli Lilly’s Chief Information and Digital Officer Diogo Rau noted that these new tools may not bring significant returns to Eli Lilly and other pharma companies in the short term. Rau said:
The real benefits of these computational discoveries we're discussing now won't be seen until 2030.
AI Drug Development Still at an Early Stage
The industry's efforts to use AI to speed up drug approval remain in the early phases.
No drugs designed using AI have reached the market yet, but progress is reflected in the increasing number of AI-discovered drugs entering clinical trials and in recent pharma investments and partnerships focused on AI.
Eli Lilly’s Chief AI Officer Thomas Fuchs commented:
This supercomputer is truly a novel scientific instrument, just like a giant microscope for biologists.
Fuchs emphasized:
Scientists will be able to train AI models with millions of experiments to test potential drugs, greatly expanding the scale and complexity of drug discovery.
Rau also pointed out that while finding new drugs isn't the only focus of these tools, "that’s where the biggest opportunity lies." He said:
We hope to discover new molecules that humans alone could never find.
AI Infrastructure Needed for Precision Medicine Goals
Eli Lilly also plans to use the supercomputer to shorten drug development cycles and help treatments take effect more quickly.
The company stated that advanced scientific AI agents can support researchers, advanced medical imaging can let scientists observe disease progression more clearly, and help develop biomarkers for precision treatments.
Precision medicine is an approach to disease prevention and treatment customized to differences in individuals’ genes, environment, and lifestyle.
NVIDIA's Vice President of Healthcare, Kimberly Powell, said:
We hope to fulfill the promise of precision medicine; without AI infrastructure, we’ll never achieve that goal. So, we’re doing all the necessary building. Technology is about to take off, and Eli Lilly is a prime example.
Open Platform Sharing R&D Data
Multiple AI models will be available on Eli Lilly’s Lilly TuneLab platform, launched last September.
This is an AI and machine learning platform allowing biotech companies to access Eli Lilly’s drug discovery models trained on years of proprietary research. This data is worth $1 billion.
Lilly launched the platform to expand industry-wide access to drug discovery tools. Kimberly Powell said:
It is very meaningful to help these startups, otherwise they might need years and burn capital to reach that stage.
She also added that the company is "excited to be involved" in this initiative. In exchange, biotech companies need to contribute some of their own research and data to help train AI models.
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