Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang speaks at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Jan. 6. (Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)
- Nvidia and Eli Lilly are jointly investing $1 billion to create an AI-focused lab in San Francisco to accelerate drug discovery. The investment will be spent over five years on infrastructure, compute, and talent, with Nvidia's engineers collaborating with Lilly's experts to generate data and build AI models for medicine development.
- Nvidia's partnership with Lilly is part of a broader trend of AI investments in the healthcare industry, with Nvidia also working with other companies like Novo Nordisk, the Mayo Clinic, Illumina, and IQVIA.
“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.
The $1 billion investment will be spent over five years on infrastructure, compute, and talent for the lab. Nvidia's engineers will work alongside Lilly's experts in biology, science, and medicine to generate large-scale data and build AI models to advance medicine development. The lab's work will begin early this year, the companies said.
The investment builds on Nvidia and Lilly's existing partnership. Lilly in October said it was building an AI factory with Nvidia's AI systems to speed up drug discovery timelines.
Lilly shares rose fractionally Monday and are up nearly 34% over the past year, surpassing the S&P 500's (^GSPC) 19% gain. The company became the first healthcare name to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization in November.
Nvidia, meanwhile, is the most valuable company in the world, becoming the first to cross $5 trillion in 2025. The AI chipmaker's project with Lilly is the latest in a string of investments and deals spanning the AI ecosystem — some of which have raised eyebrows on Wall Street and spurred fears of an AI bubble.
In the healthcare space, Nvidia has also invested in biotech firm Recursion and has inked partnerships with other industry leaders, including Lilly rival Novo Nordisk (NVO), the Mayo Clinic, Illumina, and IQVIA, to use AI in medical research and development.
“AI is transforming every industry, and its most profound impact will be in life sciences,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in a statement Monday.
. Hopefully we can start curing some of these diseases that we have spent 100s of millions of dollars "studying".