NVIDIA announces Lilly, Thermo Fisher collaborations at JPM

Global chipmaker giant NVIDIA kicked off JPM Week with several partnership announcements, most notably a billion dollar partnership with Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly.

"Biology is on the verge of its transformer moment, coinciding with a new scientific paradigm where AI agents and automated labs work together to drive breakthrough discovery," Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare and Life Sciences at NVIDIA, said at a pre-show briefing with journalists. "To turbocharge progress across these fronts, we are pleased to announce a landmark strategic partnership with Eli Lilly, featuring a new AI co-innovation lab and a five-year commitment of over a billion dollars.

"This co-innovation lab is dedicated to achieving accelerated closed-loop discovery and the creation of AI models to improve clinical development. We'll also be working together on opportunities to apply AI across Lily's businesses, from manufacturing to commercial operations."

The lab will be located at a new site in the Bay Area that the company expects to open by the end of March. NVIDIA and Lily scientists will work together on several priorities, including creating ground truth training data, shortening drug discovery and development timelines, and improving manufacturing through the use of robotics and physical AI, Powell said.

The new deal builds on the two companies' October announcement that they would work together to build a new supercomputer to power AI drug development. 

"Everything we're talking about in this partnership we will include incrementally beyond that AI factory," she said. "But as it stands today both our scientists are equipped with the amazing computational resources we need to get going. Then we have this next five years of a billion dollar investment that we'll continue to make."

NVIDIA also announced a collaboration with ThermoFisher Scientific around developing "fundamental AI infrastructure to increase the automation, accuracy, and speed of laboratories," Powell said. They are also working with Multiply Labs, a robotics company, toward the goal of developing fully automated AI-powered labs.

"Starting with NVIDIA DGX Spark as a benchtop AI supercomputer, Thermo and NVIDIA easily build and employ quality control and analytics agents to help scientists interpret data as it's generated, flagging anomalies, validating results, and recommending adjustments before the next run, making each experiment smarter than the last," Powell shared. "We are excited to build this future of autonomous labs together."