Nvidia and Eli Lilly and Company have announced plans to invest up to USD 1 billion over five years to establish a joint AI research laboratory focused on transforming drug discovery and pharmaceutical R&D.

The new facility will be located in the San Francisco Bay Area and is intended to bring together Lilly’s scientific and biomedical expertise with Nvidia’s computational power and artificial intelligence leadership. The lab aims to accelerate the development of new medicines by applying advanced AI models, large-scale data generation, predictive analytics, and high-performance computing to streamline early-stage research and discovery.

Under the collaboration, Nvidia engineers and AI researchers will work alongside Lilly biologists, chemists, and medical scientists. The partnership will use Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform and next-generation computing architectures to generate and analyse large datasets, build sophisticated AI models, and enable a continuous learning system that tightly integrates real-world experimentation with computational insights.

According to the companies, the initiative is designed to shorten drug development timelines, improve R&D productivity, and help discover and optimise new molecular candidates more efficiently than traditional approaches. The lab’s work is slated to begin early this year and will build on existing investments by Lilly in high-performance computing infrastructure.

“This partnership brings together some of the brightest minds in biology and AI to invent a new blueprint for drug discovery,” said Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang. Lilly’s leadership highlighted the potential to combine its deep biomedical knowledge with Nvidia’s computing capabilities to generate breakthroughs that neither organisation could achieve alone.

The joint lab expands on an existing strategic relationship between the companies, following prior collaborations that included the development of AI supercomputing resources to support research efforts. In addition to discovery work, the collaboration may explore applications of AI across clinical development, manufacturing optimisation, and other aspects of pharmaceutical operations.

Industry observers view the partnership as a sign of the growing role of artificial intelligence in life sciences, as technology companies and pharmaceutical firms increasingly join forces to reduce costs, increase speed and improve outcomes in drug development.