NVIDIA and pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly announced a $1 billion investment to build a joint AI research laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area, with construction slated to begin in early 2026 and the facility expected to open by late March 2026. The partnership will span five years and will be located in South San Francisco, a site that will be disclosed in March.
The lab will deploy NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin AI chips, the company’s latest generation of AI accelerators unveiled at CES 2026, alongside its BioNeMo platform. The combination of Vera Rubin’s high‑throughput compute and BioNeMo’s biology‑specific modeling will enable a “lab‑in‑a‑loop” workflow, where experimental data feeds directly back into AI training cycles to accelerate drug discovery and development.
From a business perspective, the collaboration signals NVIDIA’s intent to deepen its presence in the high‑margin life‑sciences market and to create a recurring revenue stream beyond hardware sales. NVIDIA plans to monetize the partnership through software subscriptions, cloud services, and data‑intelligence offerings that lock customers into its ecosystem, complementing the upfront hardware investment with ongoing service contracts.
Management emphasized the strategic fit of the partnership. NVIDIA’s Kimberly Powell highlighted that the lab will “bring significant digital update into physical use” and that the Vera Rubin platform arrives “at the right moment” to meet growing AI compute demand. Eli Lilly’s Diogo Rau noted that the collaboration will “unite massive compute, specialized talent and the ability to shape data at immense scale,” positioning Lilly to accelerate discovery. CEO Jensen Huang underscored that AI is “transforming every industry” and that the Vera Rubin launch “takes a giant leap toward the next frontier of AI.”
While no immediate market reaction data is available, the announcement underscores NVIDIA’s broader strategy to capture a larger share of the life‑sciences AI market, a sector projected to grow rapidly. The partnership also positions both companies to benefit from the increasing integration of AI in drug development, potentially accelerating time‑to‑market for new therapies.
The joint lab is expected to become operational by late March 2026, after which NVIDIA and Eli Lilly will begin integrating experimental workflows with AI models. The partnership is poised to generate both upfront hardware revenue and ongoing software and services income, reinforcing NVIDIA’s shift toward a platform‑centric, recurring‑revenue business model in a high‑growth vertical.
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