Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs

Nvidia has teamed up with pharmaceutical heavyweight Eli Lilly to plow up to $1 billion into a research lab over the next five years to advance the development of foundation models for AI-assisted drug discovery.

Announced at the JPMorgan Healthcare conference on Monday, the collaboration will span the infrastructure, talent, and compute necessary to develop these biology and chemistry models using Nvidia's BioNeMo software platform and Vera Rubin accelerators.

Introduced in fall 2022, just months before ChatGPT kicked off the AI arms race, BioNeMo is an open source framework for building and training deep learning models for use in drug discovery.

Located in the San Francisco Bay Area, the so-called co-innovation lab will bring together Eli Lilly's top biologists and chemists to work alongside Nvidia's software engineers and model devs, when it opens later this year.

"Combining our volumes of data and scientific knowledge with Nvidia's ...