Catenaa, Monday, January 12, 2026- Nvidia and US pharma giant Eli Lilly will spend $1 billion building a new joint research lab in the San Francisco Bay Area over five years using Vera Rubin AI chips.
The announcement at the start of a weeklong JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco comes just months after Zepbound maker Lilly said it is building a supercomputer using more than 1,000 of Nvidia’s current-generation Grace Blackwell AI chips.
“Combining our volumes of data and scientific knowledge with NVIDIA’s computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it,” said Lilly CEO David Ricks.
Lilly is among a raft of drugmakers that are increasingly relying on sophisticated AI models to both design and discover new treatments, to slash the time it takes to get new offerings to market.
The pharma group and Nvidia, the world’s most valuable listed firm, did not say whether Nvidia cash would flow to Lilly and be used to buy Nvidia chips, a circular arrangement that has raised questions about other Nvidia investments.
Nvidia’s strategy in the biotechnology market is to supply open-source AI models and software that drugmakers can then use to build their own drug development platforms using Nvidia’s hardware.
The company on Monday released a raft of new models, including an updated one for ensuring that drugs designed with AI tools are practical to synthesize in real-world labs.
Lilly shares rose fractionally on Monday and are up nearly 34% over the past year, surpassing the S&P 500’s 19% gain. The company became the first health-care name to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization in November.
