By Angus Liu
Publication Date: 2026-01-12 15:00:00
Eli Lilly and Nvidia, two primary drivers of the recent stock market rally, are deepening their alliance to connect silicon with biology through artificial-intelligence-powered drug development.
The two companies will establish a new AI co-innovation lab with a commitment to invest more than $1 billion over five years, Nvidia announced at the 2026 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco.
“This co-innovation lab is dedicated to achieving accelerated, closed-loop discovery and the creation of AI models to improve clinical development,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at Nvidia, said in a press briefing.
Scientists from the two firms will come together at a new site in the Bay Area that the pair expects to open by the end of March, Powell said.
Both sides are allocating dedicated, incremental resources to the partnership. Lilly will contribute its drug R&D expertise and laboratory infrastructure, while Nvidia will provide AI capabilities including open biology models, multimodal foundation models, agentic and physical AI, and DGX Cloud capacity, according to Powell.
“We see this as a catalyst for the capabilities that will define the next era of drug discovery,” Diogo Rau, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Lilly, said in a Jan. 12 statement. “By working with NVIDIA, we’re uniting massive compute, specialized talent and the ability to shape data at immense…
