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Pharma giant Eli Lilly and Company is collaborating with chip maker NVIDIA to build a supercomputer to manage data ingestion, training, fine-tuning and high-volume inference to enhance drug discovery.
Lilly said the supercomputer will power an AI factory and allow scientists to identify, optimize and validate new molecules as well as train AI models on millions of experiments to test for potential medicines.
It will also help with manufacturing processes, which Lilly said "can benefit from digital twins together with NVIDIA's robotic technologies to improve production efficiency and reduce downtime."
The supercomputer will also help with medical imaging to give researchers a better view of how diseases progress to help develop new biomarkers for personalized treatments.
In addition, it will power enterprise AI agents, which Lilly said can help researchers with reasoning, planning and cross-collaboration in physical and digital environments.
"The supercomputer is the world's first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems. It is powered by more than 1,000 B300 GPUs on a unified networking fabric, which means communication across GPUs, storage and related systems runs on just one high-speed network," Lilly said in a statement.
The company said the supercomputer will run on 100% renewable electricity within existing Lilly facilities and use the pharma giant's existing chilled water infrastructure for liquid cooling.
"The AI industrial revolution will have its most profound impact on medicine, transforming how we understand biology," Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA, said in a statement.
"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."
THE LARGER TREND
NVIDIA became the world's first company to reach a $5 trillion valuation today after the AI giant's stock shot up more than 5% to around $211.98 per share. The company just hit a $4 trillion valuation in July.
Lilly and NVIDIA's announcement is not the first this year regarding the building of AI data centers for drug discovery.
President Donald Trump announced the formation of Project Stargate during a press conference in January, alongside three partners: Oracle's Chief Technology Officer Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.
The partners said at least $500 billion will be invested in developing the physical and virtual infrastructure needed to advance AI, including building "colossal data centers" and campuses throughout the U.S. The first data center is currently being built in Abilene, Texas.
The president and his partners said one of the goals of Project Stargate is to improve health outcomes, including curing diseases, according to Altman. Son said the project will also "solve the issues that mankind would never have thought that we could solve."
In September, NVIDIA announced it is partnering with OpenAI to "deploy at least 10 gigawatts of AI datacenters with NVIDIA systems representing millions of GPUs for OpenAI’s next-generation AI infrastructure." The chip maker also invested $100 billion in OpenAI to support the partnership as each gigawatt is deployed.
The companies said the partnership complements the work OpenAI and NVIDIA were already doing with its collaborators, including its Stargate partners, "focused on building the world’s most advanced AI infrastructure."
Lila Sciences is another company developing an AI-enabled scientific superintelligence computer.
Lila closed a $350 million Series A round of financing in October. The Series A closed in two parts, with the company garnering $235 million in September. Lila launched in March with $200 million in seed funding.
The company has raised a total of $550 million in less than a year.
