By Alex Philippidis
Publication Date: 2026-01-13 21:54:00
SAN FRANCISCO—They met for the first time in 2018. David A. Ricks, a year into his tenure as Eli Lilly’s Chair and CEO, hosted Jensen Huang at Lilly’s Indianapolis headquarters campus, where the Nvidia founder and CEO gave a talk to the pharma giant’s management team about a new technology called artificial intelligence (AI) and its potential in reshaping drug discovery.
“100% being honest, I could see it in their eyes,” Huang recalled of the Lilly executives’ reaction to his talk:
“Nonsense!”
“Honestly,” Ricks interjected, “it blew my mind.”
The two CEOs recalled their first meeting on Monday, when they entertained a packed ballroom at the Fairmont San Francisco hotel, a hilly half-mile north of where the J.P. Morgan 44th Annual Healthcare Conference is taking place. The occasion was a Huang-hosted “fireside chat” in which he and Ricks discussed the companies’ latest partnership, and extolled the promise and potential of AI to reshape not just drug discovery but the development of new treatments and their uptake by patients.
The Silicon Valley microprocessing giant and pharma powerhouse announced a five-year, $1 billion partnership to create a “Co-Innovation AI Lab” designed to address key challenges in AI drug discovery.
“Moore’s law runs at about 10 times every five years, 100 times every 10 years. In the last 10 years, we’ve accelerated AI a million times,” Huang told the fireside chat audience, referring to…
