Eli Lilly Bets Big on AI and Partners with Nvidia

The Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly (NYSE: LLY), maker of the popular weight-loss drug Zepbound, is fully embracing artificial intelligence in a bid to discover new drugs in an increasingly competitive pharmaceutical landscape. In late October 2025, Lilly announced a partnership with Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA) to build what it calls the “industry’s most powerful AI supercomputer,”an “AI factory” housed in its Indianapolis data center and powered by more than 1,000 of Nvidia’s new Blackwell B300 GPUs. The system, based on Nvidia’s DGX SuperPOD architecture, is designed to attack the slowest, most capital-intensive parts of drug R&D, including discovering new molecules, identifying biological traits of diseases, predicting toxicity, optimizing clinical-trial designs, and even smoothing manufacturing and logistics bottlenecks.

Culturally, the shift is being driven from the very top, with Lilly appointing Dr. Thomas Fuchs as the company’s first Chief AI Officer in November 2024. Before joining Lilly, Fuchs served as Dean and inaugural Department Chair for AI and Human Health at Mount Sinai, Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, and the endowed Barbara T. Murphy Professor for AI and Computational Pathology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His appointment underscores Lilly’s intent to treat AI not as an IT add-on, but as a core scientific and strategic capability.

Recently, on the “Cheeky Pint” podcast, Lilly CEO David Ricks said he now runs “at least one or two AIs” in every meeting, using Anthropic’s Claude and xAI’s Grok as real-time scientific advisers. Ricks argued that modern science still understands only a small fraction of human biology and has called for national-scale, 24/7 robotic experimentation to generate the data that next-generation AI models require. This demonstrates Lilly’s ambition to go beyond the boundaries of a traditional pharmaceutical company and expand further into the biotech and broader technology arenas.

In the meantime, the market continues to be bullish on Lilly, with the stock price now up $247.21, or 31.77%, year-to-date. This enthusiasm likely reflects a combination of investor confidence in management’s AI strategy and Lilly’s extraordinary financial performance this year. In the third quarter of 2025, Lilly’s revenue jumped 54% year-on-year to $17.6 billion, driven largely by its Tirzepatide drugs (marketed as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for obesity), which generated $10.1 billion in combined quarterly sales and became the world’s top-selling drug.

While there is clear exuberance around the implementation of AI at Lilly, Diogo Rau, the company’s chief information and digital officer, has been quick to point out that the AI strategy is still in its infancy and is likely to take years before any AI-assisted drug discovery meaningfully bears fruit. For investors, the near-term story remains anchored in execution on the GLP-1 franchise, while AI represents a longer-dated call option on the company’s future innovation engine.