Eli Lilly and NVIDIA will establish a new artificial intelligence (AI) co-innovation lab, as the companies look to use each other’s expertise to advance drug development.

The lab, which will be based in the San Francisco Bay area, will see the US drugmaker and tech giant jointly invest up to $1bn over five years to level-up drug discovery. The partnership was announced at the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, held from 12 to 15 January in San Francisco.

The aim is for the building to provide a base in which Lilly’s biology and scientific experts will work alongside AI model builders and engineers from Nvidia.

“This co-innovation lab is dedicated to achieving accelerated, closed-loop discovery and the creation of AI models to improve clinical development. We'll also be working together on opportunities to apply AI across Lilly's businesses, from manufacturing to commercial operations,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia, said in a press briefing.

AI and protein modelling advancements are pushing the boundaries of what is possible in drug design, while other technologies, such as robotics, are helping streamline other areas in drug development.

Lilly’s CEO, David Ricks, stated: “Combining our volume of data and scientific knowledge with Nvidia’s computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it.”

Reacting to the partnership, Citi analysts commented: “This strategic alliance aims to fundamentally reinvent drug discovery by converging Lilly's deep pharmaceutical expertise with Nvidia’s cutting-edge AI, accelerated computing, and infrastructure capabilities.”

Nvidia and Lilly are two titans investing significant resources into advancing this area of drug development. In October 2025, the two companies announced they were building a new supercomputer to accelerate drug discovery and shorten development cycles. According to Eli Lilly at the time, the supercomputer – powered by more than a thousand graphics processing units (GPUs) – will serve as an “AI factory”, a computing infrastructure that manages the entire AI lifecycle. 

Nvidia also announced at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference 2026 that it is working with Thermo Fisher Scientific to build an autonomous lab infrastructure. The companies’ collaboration aims to transform scientific research labs into scalable, automated data factories.

Lilly made headlines on the same day the Nvidia partnership was announced after media reports linked the drugmaker to a potential $15bn acquisition of Abivax, a French biotech developing anti-inflammatory drugs.

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