INDIANAPOLIS – Eli Lilly and Company has activated LillyPod, the pharmaceutical industry’s most powerful supercomputer, built in collaboration with NVIDIA. The system, powered by 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs, is now operational at Lilly’s Indianapolis campus, marking a significant investment in artificial intelligence for drug discovery and development.
The launch, announced Wednesday, culminates a partnership between Lilly and NVIDIA that began in October 2025 with the goal of creating an “AI factory” capable of managing the entire AI lifecycle, from data ingestion to model training and deployment. LillyPod delivers more than 9,000 petaflops of AI performance, assembled in just four months, according to Lilly officials.
“It’s a big day for us with the supercomputer coming on board, but it’s a day 150 years in the making,” said Diogo Rau, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Lilly. “LillyPod is a powerful symbol of who we are and why we do this operate: to make life better for people around the world. We are, right here, right now, at the right moment to advance biology in a way that has just never been done before.”
The supercomputer will be utilized across a range of scientific disciplines, including genomics, molecule design, single-cell biology, imaging, and manufacturing operations. Lilly’s genomics team will leverage LillyPod’s capabilities to analyze 700 terabytes of data using over 290 terabytes of high-bandwidth GPU memory. Thomas Fuchs, senior vice president and chief AI officer at Lilly, emphasized the necessity of such computational power, stating, “Computation is at the heart of biology and it is at the heart of science. Being able to compute at scale is not something optional for a company like ours, it is absolutely necessary. So we are building the computational future of medicine.”
LillyPod is designed to support the training of complex AI models, including protein diffusion models, small-molecule graph neural network models, and genomics foundation models. NVIDIA’s full-stack AI factory architecture, incorporating accelerated computing, NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking, and optimized AI software, provides a secure and scalable platform for the highly regulated healthcare and life sciences sector. NVIDIA Mission Control software will manage the DGX SuperPOD, orchestrate workloads, monitor performance, and automate AI operations.
The infrastructure consists of nearly 5,000 connections built with over 1,000 pounds of fiber cables. Lilly has committed to powering its new AI infrastructure with 100% renewable electricity by 2030, utilizing efficient liquid cooling to minimize energy impact.
Lilly plans to make select models available through Lilly TuneLab, an AI and machine learning platform offering biotech companies access to drug discovery models built on proprietary Lilly data, generated at a cost exceeding $1 billion. TuneLab will also offer NVIDIA BioNeMo open foundation models for healthcare and life sciences, utilizing a federated learning infrastructure built on NVIDIA FLARE to ensure data privacy.
According to Lilly, the supercomputer addresses a key limitation in traditional drug discovery, which is constrained by the physical capacity of laboratory experiments. Yue Wang Webster, vice president of research and development informatics at Lilly, explained that the system allows scientists to simulate and evaluate billions of molecular hypotheses in a “dry lab” environment before committing to physical experiments, effectively breaking the “physical limit” of traditional research. Lilly employees can also use LillyPod to build chatbots, agentic workflows, and research lab agents.
“This machine is exactly how AI should be used,” said Fuchs. “It should be used for science. It should be used to lessen suffering and improve the human condition.”
Lilly will present further details about its collaboration with NVIDIA and a planned co-innovation AI lab at the upcoming NVIDIA GTC conference.
