{"id":4405,"date":"2026-01-17T10:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-17T10:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/2026\/01\/17\/ceos-of-nvidia-and-lilly-share-blueprint-for-what-is-possible-in-ai-and-drug-discovery\/"},"modified":"2026-01-17T10:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T10:44:08","slug":"ceos-of-nvidia-and-lilly-share-blueprint-for-what-is-possible-in-ai-and-drug-discovery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/salarydistribution.com\/machine-learning\/2026\/01\/17\/ceos-of-nvidia-and-lilly-share-blueprint-for-what-is-possible-in-ai-and-drug-discovery\/","title":{"rendered":"CEOs of NVIDIA and Lilly Share \u2018Blueprint for What Is Possible\u2019 in AI and Drug Discovery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NVIDIA and Lilly are putting together \u201ca blueprint for what is possible in the future of drug discovery,\u201d NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang told attendees at a fireside chat Monday with Dave Ricks, chair and CEO of Lilly.<\/p>\n

The conversation \u2014 which took place during the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco \u2014 focused on the announcement of a first-of-its-kind AI co-innovation lab<\/a> by NVIDIA and Lilly.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re systematically bringing together some of the brightest minds in the field of drug discovery and some of the brightest minds in computer science,\u201d Huang said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have a lab where the expertise and the scale of that lab is sufficient to attract people who really want to do their life\u2019s work at that intersection.\u201d<\/p>\n

The initiative will bring together Lilly\u2019s world-leading expertise in the pharmaceutical industry with NVIDIA\u2019s leadership in AI to tackle one of humanity\u2019s greatest challenges: modeling the complexities of biology. The two companies will jointly invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and compute over five years to support the new lab, which will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area.<\/p>\n

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During the fireside chat, Ricks reflected on the painstaking work of drug discovery and AI\u2019s potential to transform the cycle of pharmaceutical invention.<\/p>\n

\u201cEach small molecule discovery is like a work of art,\u201d he said. \u201cIf we can make that an engineering problem, versus this sort of discovery, this artisanal drug-making problem, think of the impact on human life.\u201d<\/p>\n

The lab will operate under a scientist-in-the-loop framework, where agentic wet labs are tightly connected to computational dry labs in a continuous learning system. This framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another.<\/p>\n

\u201cMachines are made to work day and night to solve this problem,\u201d Ricks said.<\/p>\n

The co-innovation lab builds on Lilly\u2019s previously announced AI supercomputer \u2014 the biopharma industry\u2019s most powerful AI factory<\/a>, an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD<\/a> with DGX B300 systems<\/a> \u2014 which will train large-scale biomedical foundation and frontier models for drug discovery and development.<\/p>\n

By integrating AI into drug discovery, Ricks explained, pharmaceutical researchers can rapidly simulate a massive number of possible molecules, test them at scale in silico and filter out promising candidates. The next challenge is to find more biological targets using AI.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe holy grail is that you put those two things together, and we can model the whole system at once,\u201d Ricks said.<\/p>\n

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Huang and Ricks also discussed Lilly\u2019s long history of harnessing computing for pharmaceutical research \u2014 and how diseases of the aging brain are the next frontier for drug discovery.<\/p>\n

\u201cI can\u2019t imagine a more worthy field to apply computer science to,\u201d Huang said. \u201cHopefully we can bend the arc of history.\u201d<\/p>\n

NVIDIA at J.P. Morgan Healthcare<\/b><\/h2>\n

NVIDIA\u2019s full-stack AI platform is accelerating the creation and deployment of leading foundation models across digital biology and drug discovery. To recognize some of the recent advancements, Huang raised a toast at J.P. Morgan Healthcare in honor of about a dozen leaders in the field \u2014 and the AI models they\u2019ve pioneered.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last 10 years, we\u2019ve advanced AI 1 million times,\u201d Huang said. \u201cI believe that over the next 10 years, you will enjoy the same adventure that I\u2019ve enjoyed in our generation \u2026 and so for each one of you \u2014 for your happy new year present and a thank you for everything that you do for the industry and for the future of humanity \u2014 I give to you a DGX Spark.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Over a dozen leaders in AI and drug discovery received NVIDIA DGX Spark<\/a> systems signed by NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The honorees included:<\/p>\n