Lilly partners with NVIDIA to build the industry's most
powerful AI supercomputer,
supercharging medicine
discovery and delivery for
patients
(ABU DHABI) - Eli Lilly and Company
(NYSE: LLY) has announced it
is building the most
powerful supercomputer owned
and operated by a
pharmaceutical company, in
collaboration with NVIDIA.
The supercomputer will power
an "AI factory," a
specialized computing
infrastructure that manages
the entire AI lifecycle from
data ingestion and training
to fine-tuning and
high-volume inference.
"Lilly's mission is to
make life better for people
around the world, and today
that requires excellence not
just in science but also in
technology," said
Diogo Rau, executive vice
president and chief
information and digital
officer at Lilly.
"I don't believe any other
company in our industry is
doing what we do at this
scale. As a 150-year-old
medicine company, one of our
most powerful assets is
decades of data. With
purpose-built AI models and
AI, we can set a new
scientific standard that
accelerates innovation to
deliver medicines to more
patients, faster."
The supercomputer is the
world's first NVIDIA DGX
SuperPOD, powered by DGX
B300 systems. It is powered
by more than 1,000 B300 GPUs
on a unified networking
fabric, which means
communication across GPUs,
storage, and related systems
runs on just one high-speed
network.
Transforming science at
scale for real-world impact
The new supercomputer
and AI factory enable rapid
learning and iteration.
Scientists will be able to
train AI models on millions
of experiments to test
potential medicines,
dramatically expanding the
scope and sophistication of
drug discovery efforts. A
number of these proprietary
AI models will be available
on
Lilly TuneLab, a
collaborative federated
AI/ML drug discovery
platform created to expand
access to advanced discovery
tools across the biopharma
ecosystem. TuneLab will
continue evolving its suite
of available models,
including the addition of
workflows that incorporate
select NVIDIA Clara
open-source models.
Beyond discovery, Lilly
plans to leverage the
supercomputer to shorten
development cycles and help
get medicines to people
faster. New scientific AI
agents can support
researchers in reasoning,
planning, and collaborating
across digital and physical
environments. With advanced
medical imaging, scientists
benefit from a clearer view
of how diseases progress and
can develop new biomarkers
for more personalized care.
Manufacturing processes can
benefit from digital twins
together with NVIDIA's
robotic technologies to
improve production
efficiency and reduce
downtime.
"The AI
industrial revolution will
have its most profound
impact on medicine,
transforming how we
understand biology," said
Kimberly Powell,
vice president of health
care at NVIDIA.
"Modern AI factories are
becoming the new instrument
of science — enabling the
shift from trial-and-error
discovery to a more
intentional design of
medicines. With its deep
scientific heritage and
commitment to innovation,
Lilly stands as a global
leader at the forefront of
this new era of medical
discovery."
"Lilly is
shifting from using AI as a
tool to embracing it as a
scientific collaborator,"
said Thomas Fuchs, senior
vice president and chief AI
officer at Lilly. "By
embedding intelligence into
every layer of our
workflows, we're opening the
door to a new kind of
enterprise: one that learns,
adapts, and improves with
every data point. This isn't
just about speed, but rather
interrogating biology at
scale, deepening our
understanding of disease and
translating that knowledge
into meaningful advances for
people served by Lilly
medicines as well as the
broader life sciences
ecosystem."
In
accordance with Lilly's
existing sustainability
commitments, including
carbon neutrality by 2030,
the supercomputer will run
on 100% renewable
electricity within existing
Lilly facilities and use
Lilly's existing chilled
water infrastructure for
liquid cooling.
Lilly's presentation,
"Enterprise-Scale AI for
Drug Discovery: Strategy,
Infrastructure and
Outcomes," was featured
at NVIDIA's
AI conference GTC held in
Washington, D.C.
