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Nvidia and Eli Lilly Commit Up to $1 Billion for Bay Area AI Drug Discovery Lab

Co-located teams will pursue a continuous wet–dry learning loop to turn lab data into deployable biology foundation models.

Overview

  • The five-year co-investment establishes a South San Francisco site targeted to open by late March, with Nvidia engineers working alongside Lilly scientists.
  • The lab will use NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform and the next-generation Vera Rubin architecture, with wider Rubin system availability reported to arrive later in 2026.
  • A central objective is generating high-quality “ground truth” datasets through automated wet labs to train foundation models and tighten the hypothesis-to-discovery cycle.
  • The scope includes clinical development and manufacturing, using digital twins and robotics to improve production capacity and supply chain reliability.
  • Some commercial details were not disclosed, and outcomes will depend on validation, regulatory scrutiny and execution, as Lilly also brings a Blackwell-based AI supercomputer online.