The news: Eli Lilly is partnering with chipmaker NVIDIA to build the pharma industry’s most powerful supercomputer. Lilly claims it will be the largest AI factory owned by a pharma company and will be up and running in January 2026.

Zooming in: Lilly will use AI to accelerate drug discovery and development.

• Scientists can train AI models on millions of experiments to search for potential drug candidates.
• Lilly can use the AI factory for tasks such as analyzing genome sequences, exploring exponential biochemical possibilities, and predicting patient outcomes, per NVIDIA.
• Some of the new AI models will be shared on Lilly’s $1 billion TuneLab, a free, open AI drug discovery platform that selected biotechs can use for their own research and in return share data with Lilly to improve its AI models.

Big Pharma companies are turning to tech firms to use AI to accelerate drug discovery and development.

Johnson & Johnson’s MedTech unit is also partnering with NVIDIA for its AI robotics technology and AI-driven surgical simulations.

• In June, Novo Nordisk struck a deal with Deep Apple Therapeutics to discover and develop cardiometabolic drugs, including for obesity.

Why it matters for pharma brands: Drug discovery and development is time-consuming and expensive, taking 10 to 15 years, while costing around $2.6 billion, per industry trade group PhRMA. AI can shorten timelines to as little as one year by some estimates, reduce costs via efficiencies, and improve failure rates, which have historically been around 90%.

Lilly’s partnership with NVIDIA highlights the shift pharma companies are making to rely on tech firms that have the computing power and AI expertise pharma needs to stay competitive. As more players adopt similar models, drugmakers’ advantage will come from how effectively they integrate AI into R&D pipelines and how quickly they translate those insights into new treatments.

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