NVIDIA and Eli Lilly are launching a groundbreaking AI co-innovation lab aimed at transforming drug discovery, with NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Lilly CEO Dave Ricks describing the initiative as a “blueprint for what is possible” in the future of medicine. The announcement came during a fireside chat at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, where the two leaders outlined a bold vision for merging cutting-edge AI with pharmaceutical science. The new lab, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, will bring together top scientists from both companies and attract leading talent from across the fields of biology, chemistry, and computer science. Over the next five years, NVIDIA and Lilly will jointly invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure, and computing resources to build a powerful, integrated research environment. Huang emphasized the ambition of the project, stating that the lab’s scale and expertise would draw individuals passionate about solving one of humanity’s greatest challenges—understanding and manipulating biological complexity. “We’re going to have a lab where the expertise and the scale of that lab is sufficient to attract people who really want to do their life’s work at that intersection,” he said. Ricks highlighted the transformative potential of AI in drug discovery, comparing traditional small molecule development to a form of artistry. “If we can make that an engineering problem, versus this sort of discovery, this artisanal drug-making problem, think of the impact on human life,” he said. The lab will operate under a scientist-in-the-loop framework, combining AI-driven computational modeling with automated wet labs in a continuous feedback loop. This approach enables real-time learning—where experiments generate data that refine AI models, which in turn guide new experiments—creating a self-improving system capable of working around the clock. This initiative builds on Lilly’s recently unveiled AI supercomputer, the biopharma industry’s most powerful AI infrastructure. Powered by NVIDIA’s DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems, it will train large-scale biomedical foundation and frontier models for drug discovery and development. By leveraging AI, researchers can simulate millions of molecular interactions in silico, rapidly identifying promising candidates before moving to physical testing. The ultimate goal is to model entire biological systems—predicting how drugs interact with targets, pathways, and diseases simultaneously. Huang praised Lilly’s legacy of integrating computing into pharmaceutical research and called the aging brain a critical frontier for innovation. “I can’t imagine a more worthy field to apply computer science to,” he said. “Hopefully we can bend the arc of history.” During the conference, Huang also honored 13 pioneers in AI-driven drug discovery by presenting them with NVIDIA DGX Spark systems—compact, powerful AI workstations. The recipients include leaders from companies such as VantAI, Boltz, Genesis Molecular AI, Recursion, Basecamp Research, Isomorphic, Latent Labs, Chai Discovery, Iambic Therapeutics, and Insilico Medicine, each recognized for developing transformative models in protein folding, molecular design, and biological language modeling. NVIDIA also announced significant enhancements to its BioNeMo platform, expanding its tools for AI-driven biology and drug discovery. The company further highlighted collaborations with Thermo Fisher to develop autonomous lab systems and with Multiply Labs, a startup offering robotic platforms for scalable cell therapy manufacturing. The J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, the world’s largest healthcare investment event, brought together over 8,000 professionals from around the globe, including investors, executives, and policymakers. The event underscored the growing role of AI in reshaping healthcare, with NVIDIA at the forefront of this revolution.