Eli Lilly Launches World’s Most Powerful AI Factory to Accelerate Drug Discovery

Eli Lilly has launched “LillyPod,” the world’s most powerful AI factory owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company, developed in collaboration with NVIDIA to accelerate pharmaceutical discovery and development. Powered by more than 1,000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and delivering over 9,000 petaflops of AI performance, the supercomputing platform enables large-scale analysis of genomic and molecular data, supporting faster drug design, clinical development optimization, and manufacturing innovation. The facility was inaugurated in Indianapolis and is expected to significantly enhance AI-driven scientific research across Lilly’s pharmaceutical value chain.

AI Infrastructure Redefining Drug Research

LillyPod functions as a large-scale computational “dry lab,” allowing scientists to simulate and evaluate billions of molecular hypotheses before conducting physical experiments. The system supports advanced AI models, including protein diffusion, genomics foundation models, and graph neural networks, helping researchers move beyond traditional wet-lab limitations and dramatically expand research productivity.

Strategic Expansion of AI Collaboration in Biotech

The platform will also power Lilly TuneLab, an AI ecosystem designed to provide biotech partners access to proprietary drug discovery models alongside NVIDIA’s healthcare foundation models through federated learning. This approach aims to accelerate industry collaboration while maintaining data privacy, positioning AI infrastructure as a core competitive differentiator in next-generation pharmaceutical innovation.