By Laura Bratton
Publication Date: 2026-01-12 16:34:00
AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA) and pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (LLY) on Monday announced that the two companies will jointly invest $1 billion to create a lab in San Francisco focused on using AI to accelerate drug discovery.
“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,” said Lilly CEO David Ricks.
The $1 billion investment will be spent over five years on infrastructure, compute, and talent for the lab. Nvidia’s engineers will work alongside Lilly’s experts in biology, science, and medicine to generate large scale data and build AI models to advance medicine development. The lab’s work will begin early this year, the companies said.
The investment builds on Nvidia and Lilly’s existing partnership. Lilly in October said it is building an AI factory with Nvidia’s AI systems to speed up drug discovery timelines.
Lilly shares rose fractionally Monday and are up nearly 34% over the past year, surpassing the S&P 500’s (^GSPC) 19% gain. The company became the first health-care name to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization in November.
Nvidia, meanwhile, is the most valuable company in the world, becoming the first to cross $5 trillion in 2025. The AI chipmaker’s project with Lilly is the latest in a string of investments and deals spanning the AI ecosystem — some of which have raised eyebrows on…
