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Medicine pioneer Lilly is deploying what is advertised as the largest and most powerful AI factory wholly owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company. Built with 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, the AI factory is intended to compress drug discovery timelines and enable accelerated breakthroughs in genomics, personalized medicine, and molecular design at industrial scale.
The AI factory will be used to train large-scale biomedical foundation and frontier models for drug discovery and development. Select models will be made available on Lilly TuneLab—an AI and machine learning platform that provides biotech companies with access to drug discovery models built on $1 billion worth of Lilly’s proprietary data. TuneLab uses a federated learning infrastructure built on NVIDIA FLARE, which enables biotechs to tap into powerful proprietary AI models while keeping their own data private and separate from other users.
The AI factory is powered by NVIDIA’s full-stack AI factory architecture offered with NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD—including accelerated computing, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, and optimized AI software. NVIDIA Mission Control software allows Lilly to manage its DGX SuperPOD, orchestrate workloads, monitor performance, and automate AI operations securely and efficiently across more than 1,000 GPUs.
AI Applied Across Drug Discovery and Precision Medicine
Lilly scientists can use the AI factory to analyze entire genome sequences, predict patient outcomes, and explore multitudes of biochemical possibilities. Using the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform, Lilly can train AI models that combine the learnings of millions of past experiments with public research to generate and test new antibodies, nanobodies, and novel molecules with greater accuracy and speed. The AI factory can also be applied to help discover new biomarkers and design gene therapies for degenerative conditions.
Using the AI factory, the company can build large language models that accelerate clinical trials by helping with medical writing and other internal workflows. Combined with the open-source MONAI framework, the AI factory can accelerate Lilly’s imaging-based research in precision medicine. Deep learning on massive imaging datasets can reduce processing time from months to days, allowing for quicker, more personalized treatments.
Research and Biomanufacturing With Physical and Agentic AI
The AI factory is poised to enhance Lilly’s capacity to manufacture high-demand medications and strengthen supply chain reliability, including through the use of physical AI. With technologies like the NVIDIA Omniverse platform and NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers, the pharma company can create digital twins of its manufacturing lines to model, stress-test, and optimize entire supply chains before making physical changes in the real world. Digital twins can increase production safety while accelerating quality assurance and other biomanufacturing operations, ultimately getting medicines to patients faster.
Lilly also uses robots in its factories for quality inspection and transport of goods—such as medicines and treatment components like injectors—optimizing operations and keeping production lines up and running. With the NVIDIA Isaac platform, Lilly can deploy intelligent robotics to modernize therapeutics production and support the workforce. NVIDIA Isaac Sim, for example, lets developers simulate and test AI-driven robotics solutions that can be adapted to pharma workflows. Plus, using NVIDIA NeMo software, Lilly can create AI agents that can reason, plan, and act across digital and physical labs, with the goal of helping to generate new molecules, design treatments in silico, and test them in vitro.
In 1992, Lilly’s Cray supercomputer was the pinnacle of scientific computing. Today, a single NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPU in the new AI factory contains the power of approximately seven million Cray systems. And since the AI factory comprises 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs, it delivers over 9,000 petaflops of AI performance. This means it can do over nine quintillion math problems every second.
The collaboration with NVIDIA is a cornerstone of Lilly’s innovation blueprint, building on its $50 billion commitment to expanding its US manufacturing and R&D footprint. This commitment includes four new facilities and a proposed $4.5 billion lab in Indiana, called the Lilly Medicine Foundry, for advanced manufacturing and drug development.
Find out more about ARC’s coverage of Industrial AI’s Role in the Digital Transformation of Industry.