NVIDIA and Eli Lilly and Company have announced on January 12th, 2026 a joint AI co-innovation lab focused on applying artificial intelligence and accelerated computing to drug discovery and biomedical research, with a planned investment of up to $1 billion over five years. The initiative was unveiled at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco and is positioned as a collaborative effort to integrate computational modeling with experimental science across multiple stages of pharmaceutical research and development.

The lab will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and will bring together Lilly researchers in biology, chemistry, and medicine with NVIDIA AI engineers and platform specialists. According to the companies, the intent is to generate large-scale biological and chemical data and develop AI models that can support research activities ranging from early discovery through later development and manufacturing-adjacent workflows.

Above: a photo of the NVIDIA Lilly San Francisco Co-Innovation Lab announcement featuring Dave Ricks and Jensen Huang at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco. Photo by NVIDIA and modified by CircuitRoute. Used under the fair use provision.

At the center of the collaboration is NVIDIA’s BioNeMo platform, an AI development framework designed for life sciences and biopharma applications. BioNeMo combines GPU-accelerated libraries, tools, and pretrained models intended to support tasks such as target identification, molecular design, and structure prediction. Both companies described the platform as enabling tighter integration between experimental and computational workflows used in pharmaceutical research.

NVIDIA characterizes BioNeMo as supporting lab-in-the-loop workflows, in which experimental “wet lab” data and computational “dry lab” modeling inform one another as new experimental data is generated. This approach is intended to support ongoing model refinement and AI-assisted experimentation as new data becomes available.

The joint lab with Lilly is expected to apply BioNeMo alongside NVIDIA’s next-generation Vera Rubin architecture and accelerated computing infrastructure to support the development of AI models tailored to biological and chemical data. NVIDIA’s AI tools and computing platforms are positioned as the technical foundation, while Lilly contributes proprietary datasets, scientific expertise, and domain-specific research workflows.

In the announcement, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang framed the collaboration as an effort to establish a new operating blueprint for AI-driven drug discovery. Lilly chair and CEO David A. Ricks described the partnership as combining Lilly’s scientific data and research capabilities with NVIDIA’s computing platforms and AI model development experience to pursue research approaches that would be difficult for either company to execute independently.

The co-innovation lab builds on Lilly’s recent investments in AI infrastructure and positions NVIDIA and Lilly around a shared research environment that brings accelerated computing and AI model development closer to pharmaceutical discovery workflows. The effort emphasizes platform integration and experimentation, with its significance shaped by how these tools are applied within real research settings.