Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant behind the blockbuster diabetes and weight-loss drug Mounjaro, is making a significant bet on artificial intelligence as a tool for discovering new medicines.
According to Patrick Temple-West of the Financial Times, the company launched a data center in 2025 outfitted with 1,016 of Nvidia's Blackwell chips, the high-end processors that have become the workhorses of modern AI. That hardware gives Lilly serious in-house computing muscle aimed squarely at drug research.
The Financial Times reports that Lilly now plans to draw on a $7.3 billion cash reserve to fund what it describes as an "App Store" for biotech scientists. The idea is to build a platform that smaller biotech companies and researchers can tap into, rather than keeping the AI capabilities locked inside Lilly alone.
That collaborative angle is central to the plan. Per the Financial Times, Lilly is working with small biotechs on using AI to speed up and improve the hunt for new drugs — a process that has traditionally been slow, expensive, and prone to failure.
Why it matters: A pharma heavyweight pouring billions and serious AI hardware into a shared platform signals that the industry increasingly sees machine learning as core infrastructure for finding tomorrow's medicines — and could reshape how smaller players get access to that power.