Nvidia and Eli Lilly Launch $1B AI Drug Discovery Lab

On January 12, 2026, Nvidia and Eli Lilly announced that they're building the world's first artificial intelligence factory for drug discovery. Nvidia and Eli Lilly will invest up to $1 billion over five years in a co-innovation laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, merging Lilly's 150 years of pharmaceutical expertise with Nvidia's dominance in AI computing infrastructure.

For decades, wet lab experiments and computational modeling operated in silos. Chemists synthesized molecules, and computers predicted properties. The feedback loop between discovery and validation stretched across months.

The Nvidia-Lilly lab eliminates that friction by creating a continuous learning system where robotic labs automatically generate experimental data, AI models learn from that data in real time, and the models immediately inform the next round of experiments, all without human intervention between cycles.​

The architecture of the Nvidia-Lilly collaboration centers on what both companies call "closed-loop discovery", a scientist-in-the-loop framework where machines and humans work in parallel. Lilly's domain experts in biology, chemistry, and medicine will co-locate with Nvidia's AI researchers and engineers at the new facility, which is expected to open by the end of March 2026 in South San Francisco.​