Lilly and NVIDIA to Build the Most Powerful AI Supercomputer for Drug Discovery
Eli Lilly and Company (NYSE: LLY) announced a groundbreaking collaboration with NVIDIA to build the most powerful supercomputer ever owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company. The new system will power an “AI factory,” a specialised computing infrastructure designed to manage the entire AI lifecycle, from data ingestion and training to fine-tuning and high-volume inference, supercharging the pace of medicine discovery and delivery.
Diogo Rau, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Lilly said:
“Lilly’s mission is to make life better for people around the world, and today that requires excellence not just in science but also in technology. I don’t believe any other company in our industry is doing what we do at this scale. As a 150-year-old medicine company, one of our most powerful assets is decades of data. With purpose-built AI models and AI, we can set a new scientific standard that accelerates innovation to deliver medicines to more patients, faster.”
The supercomputer, the world’s first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD equipped with DGX B300 systems, is powered by more than 1,000 B300 GPUs on a unified networking fabric. This architecture allows seamless communication across GPUs, storage, and related systems over a single high-speed network, enabling unprecedented computational performance for drug discovery.
The AI factory will allow scientists to train models on millions of experiments, dramatically expanding the scale and sophistication of drug discovery. Many of these proprietary AI models will be available on Lilly TuneLab, a collaborative federated AI/ML drug discovery platform designed to provide advanced tools across the biopharma ecosystem. TuneLab will continue evolving, including workflows that integrate select NVIDIA Clara open-source models.
Beyond accelerating discovery, Lilly plans to deploy the supercomputer to shorten development cycles, supporting faster delivery of medicines. AI agents will help researchers reason, plan, and collaborate across digital and physical environments. Advanced medical imaging will give scientists clearer views of disease progression, supporting the development of new biomarkers for more personalised care. Manufacturing processes will also benefit from digital twins and NVIDIA robotic technologies to improve production efficiency and reduce downtime.
Kimberly Powell, Vice President of Health Care at NVIDIA stated:
“The AI industrial revolution will have its most profound impact on medicine, transforming how we understand biology. Modern AI factories are becoming the new instrument of science — enabling the shift from trial-and-error discovery to a more intentional design of medicines. With its deep scientific heritage and commitment to innovation, Lilly stands as a global leader at the forefront of this new era of medical discovery.”
Thomas Fuchs, Senior Vice President and Chief AI Officer at Lilly, adds:
“Lilly is shifting from using AI as a tool to embracing it as a scientific collaborator. By embedding intelligence into every layer of our workflows, we’re opening the door to a new kind of enterprise: one that learns, adapts and improves with every data point. This isn’t just about speed, but rather interrogating biology at scale, deepening our understanding of disease and translating that knowledge into meaningful advances for people served by Lilly medicines as well as the broader life sciences ecosystem.”
Aligned with Lilly’s sustainability goals, including carbon neutrality by 2030, the supercomputer will run entirely on renewable electricity within existing Lilly facilities and use the company’s chilled water infrastructure for liquid cooling.
Lilly presented its strategy and outcomes for enterprise-scale AI in drug discovery today at NVIDIA’s GTC conference in Washington, D.C.
To learn more, please visit Lilly.com and Lilly.com/news
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