Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs

Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs

Summary

Nvidia and Eli Lilly have announced a co-innovation lab in the San Francisco Bay Area, backed by up to $1 billion over five years, to build foundation models for AI-assisted drug discovery. The partnership will combine Eli Lilly’s scientific expertise and data with Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform and the new Vera Rubin GPU compute platform to train biology and chemistry models.

The lab — opening later this year — aims to create a continuous learning system linking Lilly’s wet labs with computational dry labs to enable essentially round‑the‑clock experimentation. It will use Vera Rubin accelerators (promised to deliver roughly five times the performance of prior Blackwell GPUs) and Nvidia’s BioNeMo open framework. Lilly will also explore AI applications beyond discovery, such as clinical development, manufacturing and commercial operations, including Nvidia’s Omniverse Robotics for plant optimisation.

Key Points

• Nvidia and Eli Lilly commit up to $1bn across infrastructure, talent and compute to a joint AI drug discovery lab.
• The lab will use Nvidia’s BioNeMo framework and the newly announced Vera Rubin GPUs to train foundation models for biology and chemistry.
• The facility will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and bring Lilly’s biologists and chemists together with Nvidia engineers.
• Primary objective: a continuous learning system that tightly links wet‑lab experiments with computational model development to support 24/7 experimentation.
• Vera Rubin systems promise a substantial performance uplift over Blackwell; broad availability expected later in the year.
• Lilly already operates significant Blackwell Ultra GPU capacity (a 1,016 B300 GPU SuperPOD) and will extend AI use into manufacturing and commercial ops.

Why should I read this?

Because it’s big: billion‑dollar backing, brand‑new top‑end Nvidia silicon and a plan to turn lab work into a near‑continuous AI experiment factory. If you care about where drug discovery, biotech AI or HPC is heading, this is worth five minutes of your time — and might change how new medicines are found and scaled.

Author style

Punchy: this is a heavyweight alliance — cash, chips and chemistry. The deal signals how fast pharma is shifting toward AI‑first research pipelines and how vendors like Nvidia are positioning their latest hardware as the enabler. Read the detail if you want to understand who gets early access to Vera Rubin power and what a 24/7 CI/CD‑style pipeline for wet labs could mean for R&D velocity.

Source

Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2026/01/12/nvidia_eli_lilly_ai_drug_lab/