Lilly partners with Nvidia to build AI supercomputer, medicine discovery

Eli Lilly (LLY) announced it is building “the most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company,” in collaboration with Nvidis (NVDA). 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. The supercomputer is the world’s first Nvidia DGX SuperPOD with 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. 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.