Nvidia has teamed up with pharmaceutical heavyweight Eli Lilly to plow up to $1 billion into a research lab over the next five years to advance the development of foundation models for AI-assisted drug discovery.
Announced at the JPMorgan Healthcare conference on Monday, the collaboration will span the infrastructure, talent, and compute necessary to develop these biology and chemistry models using Nvidia's BioNeMo software platform and Vera Rubin accelerators.
Introduced in fall 2022, just months before ChatGPT kicked off the AI arms race, BioNeMo is an open source framework for building and training deep learning models for use in drug discovery.
Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, the so-called co-innovation lab will bring together Eli Lilly's top biologists and chemists to work alongside Nvidia's software engineers and model devs, when it opens later this year.
"Combining our volumes of data and scientific knowledge with Nvidia's computational power and model-building expertise could reinvent drug discovery as we know it," Eli Lilly CEO David Ricks said in a canned statement.
Once operational, Nvidia says the lab's first order of business will be to create a "continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly's agentic wet labs with computational dry labs." The GPU slinger claims that this will enable "24/7 experimentation."
We've reached out to Nvidia to ask what that actually means, but reading between the lines, it sounds like the teams will be building the equivalent of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for AI-assisted drug research. The idea is that, when the scientists go home for the evening, the compute resources can go to work preparing for the next day's experiments.
From there, the two companies will harness Nvidia's newly unveiled Vera Rubin compute platform. Announced at CES last week, the system promises a fivefold increase in performance over Nvidia's prior-gen Blackwell GPUs. These chips will provide the computational grunt necessary to train new foundation models based on the lab's research.
This suggests the lab will be among the first to get its hands on the chips, which aren't expected to be available in any significant numbers until the second half of this year.
In the meantime, it's not like Eli Lilly is hurting for compute. At GTC DC last October, the pharmaceutical giant revealed it had deployed a Blackwell Ultra-based SuperPOD complete with 1,016 B300 GPUs to support its exploration into computational biology and chemistry.
The lab's sole focus won't be limited to AI drug discovery, however. Researchers will also explore applications for AI in clinical development, manufacturing, and commercial operations.
For example, Eli Lilly is also investigating Nvidia's Omniverse Robotics platforms as a means to optimize its manufacturing plants and increase production of high-demand drugs. ®
Source: The register