NVIDIA and Lilly Launch $1B AI Co-Innovation Hub for Drug Discovery in South San Francisco
Eli Lilly and NVIDIA announced at the January 12, 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco that they are creating a new AI co-innovation lab in South San Francisco, with the companies planning to invest up to $1 billion over five years in talent, infrastructure, and compute.
The lab will co-locate Lilly scientists working across biology, chemistry, and medicine with NVIDIA AI researchers and engineers, operating as a shared, multidisciplinary research hub.
NVIDIA says the lab’s infrastructure will be built on its BioNeMo platform and Vera Rubin architecture, and the initial technical focus is a “continuous learning system” that links Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs to support always-on, scientist-in-the-loop experimentation and model improvement.
The companies position the hub as a place to generate large-scale lab data for training next-generation biology and chemistry models, with an emphasis on producing ground-truth experimental data to train and validate foundation and frontier models and shorten the cycle between hypothesis and experimentation, extending work tied to Lilly’s "AI factory" effort. Beyond discovery, NVIDIA says the collaboration will explore applying multimodal models, agentic AI, robotics, and digital twins across clinical development and manufacturing, including the use of Omniverse libraries and RTX PRO servers to model and optimize manufacturing lines and supply chains. The companies expect work at the South San Francisco site to begin in early 2026.
The collaboration also follows Lilly’s launch of TuneLab in September 2025, a federated platform that gives selected biotech partners access to Lilly drug discovery models trained on internal datasets the company has said cost over $1 billion to generate.
Over the past several months, Eli Lilly has expanded its AI-driven R&D strategy through multiple partnerships and platform moves, including a research and licensing collaboration with Insilico Medicine worth over $100 million to apply Insilico's platform for generative small-molecule discovery; a partnership with Schrödinger to integrate Lilly’s TuneLab models into the LiveDesign platform starting in Q1 2026; and a collaboration with Chai Discovery, following its $130 million Series B, to train bespoke biologics models on Lilly’s internal data.
Lilly has also broadened access to TuneLab via integrations with Benchling and Revvity, extending federated AI models trained on more than $1 billion in proprietary data to over 1,300 biotech companies. On the therapeutics side, Lilly signed a multi-target oncology deal with InduPro valued at up to $950 million to apply AI-enabled membrane interactomics to multispecific cancer therapies.
Topic: Industry Movers
