Roche accelerates AI adoption with NVIDIA deal
Roche's AI-powered digital pathology open environment in action.
Roche has ramped up its investment in NVIDIA's AI chips, launching an upscaled hybrid-cloud AI factory that it believes is the largest in the pharma industry.
The Swiss group has bought 2,176 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, taking the total in its AI infrastructure to more than 3,500 across its facilities in the US and Europe, in a major expansion of an alliance with NVIDIA that dates back to 2023.
At the heart of the partnership is a 'lab-in-the-loop' concept, where AI algorithms are refined and improved by real-world experimental results in a continuous cycle, in an attempt to accelerate the development of new diagnostics and therapeutics. The approach helps scientists test hypotheses at scale, accelerate progress, and make discoveries that were not possible otherwise, according to Roche.
Drug discovery using AI is being trumpeted as a way to shorten the time to lead candidate selection, reduce costs, and improve success rates, thanks to its ability to process large-scale datasets, uncover patterns, and generate predictions that can be deployed in the discovery of new targets and drug design.
"In healthcare, time is the most critical variable; every day saved means a life-changing medicine or diagnostic reaches a patient sooner," said Wafaa Mamilli, the group's chief digital and technology officer.
"Our AI factory combines world-class computing power with Roche's scientific expertise to embed AI across the entire value chain - from discovery to development, manufacturing, and commercialisation - transforming how we deliver the next generation of medicines and diagnostics solutions."
The AI factory will also power the use of 'digital twins' - virtual replicas of production lines - in Roche's manufacturing to improve processes and factory designs, and support the development of digital pathology software to gain insights from medical images and digital health tools based on "safe and reliable healthcare-grade conversational AI."
NVIDIA has positioned itself as a key partner for pharma as it embraces the AI revolution, and the alliance with Roche lies alongside other strategic-level deals with other companies, including agreements with Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk signed in 2025, with Lilly expanding its project with a $1 billion co-innovation lab in San Francisco, due to open in the next few weeks.
The tech giant's main rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has also started to push into the pharma space, in part via a partnership signed last year with Absci.
"Our expanded collaboration with NVIDIA and the launch of this AI factory further strengthens our leadership in AI-driven drug discovery and development," said Aviv Regev, head of the Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED) unit at Roche.
"By providing the massive computational power needed to continue to scale our lab-in-the-loop strategy […] our scientists can build more sophisticated predictive frontier models and further shorten the path from biological insight to life-saving medicine."
