Eli Lilly and Nvidia are building a supercomputer and AI factory for drug discovery

Eli Lilly and Nvidia The two companies announced Tuesday that they are partnering to build what they call the pharmaceutical industry’s “most powerful supercomputer” and a so-called artificial intelligence factory to help accelerate drug discovery and development across the sector.

It’s the latest move by Nvidia and the pharmaceutical industry to harness artificial intelligence to help reduce the time it takes to deliver treatments to patients, while reducing costs at every stage of drug discovery and development. The process usually takes about 10 years on average, from administering the first human dose to launching it on the market, Diogo Rao, chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly, said in an interview.

“The things that we’re talking about discovering with the kind of power that we have now, we’ll see those benefits in 2030,” Rao said.

Eli Lilly expects to complete construction of the supercomputer and artificial intelligence factory in December. They will go online in January.

Industry efforts to use artificial intelligence to get medicines to people faster are still in their early stages. There are no drugs on the market designed using AI, but progress is evident in the number of AI-discovered drugs entering clinical trials, recent AI-focused investments, and partnerships between drugmakers.

Eli Lilly will own and operate the supercomputer, which will be powered by more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs — a newer family of chips from Nvidia — connected to a unified, high-speed network. The supercomputer will power the AI ​​Factory, a specialized computing infrastructure that will develop, train and deploy large-scale AI models for drug discovery and development.

Thomas Fox, chief artificial intelligence officer at Eli Lilly, said the supercomputer “is really a new scientific tool. It’s like a huge microscope for biologists.” “It really allows us to do things we couldn’t do before on such a massive scale.

Scientists will be able to train AI models on millions of experiments to test potential drugs, “dramatically expanding the scope and complexity” of drug discovery, according to a statement from Eli Lilly.

While finding new drugs This isn’t the sole focus of the new tools, Rao said, but rather “where the biggest opportunity is.”

“We hope that we can discover new molecules that we would not be able to discover with humans alone,” he said.

Many of the AI ​​models will be available on Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform that allows biotech companies to access drug discovery models that Eli Lilly has trained over years of its own research. The value of this data is one billion dollars.

Eli Lilly launched that platform in September as a way to expand access to drug discovery Tools across the sector.

“It’s really powerful to be able to give an additional springboard to these startups, which, you know, might take a few years to burn through their capital to get to that point,” said Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, adding that the company is “thrilled to participate” in the effort.

Rao noted that in exchange for access to the AI ​​models, biotech companies are expected to contribute some of their own research and data to help train them. TuneLab’s platform uses what’s called federated learning, which means companies can leverage Lilly’s AI models without either side sharing data directly.

Eli Lilly also plans to use the supercomputer to shorten the drug development process and help get treatments to people faster.

New scientific AI agents can support researchers, and advanced medical imaging can give scientists a clearer view of how diseases develop and help them develop new biomarkers — a measurable marker of a biological process or condition — for personalized care, the company said.

“We would actually like to deliver on this promise of precision medicine,” Powell said. “Without the infrastructure and foundation for AI, we’ll never get there, right? So we’re doing all the necessary building work, and now we’re seeing this real takeoff, and Lily is an exact example of that.”

Precision medicine is an approach that tailors disease prevention and treatment to differences in a person’s genes, environments, and lifestyles.