Eli Lilly and Nvidia are building supercomputers and AI factories for drug research
Eli Lilly And Nvidia They are working together to build what they say is the pharmaceutical industry’s “most powerful” supercomputer and so-called AI factory to accelerate drug discovery and development across the industry, the companies announced Tuesday.
It’s the latest move by Nvidia and the pharmaceutical industry to use AI to shorten the time to cure patients while reducing costs at every stage of drug research and development. The process takes, on average, about 10 years from administering a drug to the first person to bringing it to market, said Diogo Rau, Eli Lilly’s chief information and digital officer, in an interview.
Eli Lilly expects construction of the supercomputer and AI factory to be completed in December. They will go live in January. But the new tools probably won’t bring significant returns to the company’s business or that of another drugmaker until the end of the decade.
“The things that we’re talking about discovering with this kind of power that we have right now, we’re really going to see benefits in 2030,” Rau said.
Industry efforts to use AI to bring medicines to people more quickly are still in their infancy. There are no drugs on the market developed using AI, but progress can be seen 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 is powered by more than 1,000 Blackwell Ultra GPUs – a newer family of chips from Nvidia – connected via 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 research and development.
The supercomputer “is really a new kind of scientific tool. It’s like a giant microscope for biologists,” said Thomas Fuchs, Eli Lilly’s chief AI officer. “It really allows us to do things we couldn’t do before on this massive scale.”
According to a press release from Eli Lilly, scientists will be able to train AI models for millions of experiments to test potential drugs, “dramatically expanding the scope and complexity” of drug discovery.
In the search for new drugs is not the only focus of the new tools, but “that is where the great opportunity lies,” said Rau.
“We hope to discover new molecules that we could never have achieved with humans alone,” he said.
Multiple AI models will be available on Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform that allows biotech companies to access drug development models trained by Eli Lilly through years of proprietary research. This data is worth $1 billion.
Eli Lilly launched this platform in September to expand access to drug research Tools across the industry.
“It’s really powerful to be able to provide these startups with that additional starting point, because otherwise it could take them a few years of burning through capital to get to this point,” said Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of healthcare, adding that the company is “very pleased to participate in this effort.”
In return for access to the AI models, biotech companies are expected to contribute some of their own research and data to help train them, Rau emphasized. The TuneLab platform uses federated learning, which means companies can use Lilly’s AI models without either party sharing data directly.
Eli Lilly also plans to use the supercomputer to speed drug development and help get treatments to people more quickly.
The company said new scientific AI agents can assist researchers, and advanced medical imaging can give scientists a clearer view of the progression of diseases and help them develop new biomarkers – a measurable sign of a biological process or condition – for personalized care.
“We want to actually deliver on this promise of precision medicine,” Powell said. “Without an AI infrastructure and a foundation, we’re never going to get there, are we? So we’re doing all the necessary construction, and now we’re seeing this real recovery begin, and Lilly is an exact example of that.”
Precision medicine is an approach that tailors disease prevention and treatment to differences in a person’s genes, environment and lifestyle.
