NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI Factory: 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs for Drug Discovery

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NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI Factory: 1,016 Blackwell Ultra GPUs for Drug Discovery

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In October 2025, Eli Lilly and NVIDIA announced a strategic collaboration to deploy the world's first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD with DGX B300 systems — the largest, most powerful AI factory wholly owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company. Built from 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and announced at NVIDIA GTC Washington, D.C., the AI factory delivers over 9,000 petaflops of AI performance (a single Blackwell Ultra GPU alone has roughly the compute power of approximately 7 million Cray supercomputers, Lilly's 1992 reference platform). The system is used across the full drug discovery-to-delivery value chain. With the NVIDIA BioNeMo platform, Lilly trains foundation and frontier models that combine millions of past experiments with public research to generate and test new antibodies, nanobodies, and novel molecules. With NVIDIA NeMo, Lilly deploys AI agents that can reason, plan, and act across digital and physical labs to propose and test molecules in silico. The AI factory is also applied to precision medicine: combined with the open-source MONAI framework, deep learning on massive imaging datasets reduces processing time from months to days. On the manufacturing side, Lilly uses NVIDIA Omniverse to create digital twins of manufacturing lines to model, stress-test, and optimize entire supply chains before physical changes; NVIDIA Isaac powers intelligent robotics for quality inspection, transport, and therapeutics production; NVIDIA RTX PRO Servers support biomanufacturing. The system is managed end-to-end by NVIDIA Mission Control across 1,000+ GPUs. Selected models are exposed externally via Lilly TuneLab, a federated-learning AI/ML platform that gives biotech companies access to drug-discovery models built on over USD 1 billion of Lilly's proprietary data; TuneLab is now the first drug discovery platform to offer both Lilly models and NVIDIA Clara open foundation models for healthcare and life sciences. Lilly has been ranked the No. 1 most AI-ready pharma company by CB Insights. The AI factory is a cornerstone of Lilly's USD 50 billion commitment to U.S. manufacturing and R&D expansion, including four new facilities and a proposed USD 4.5 billion Medicine Foundry lab in Indiana for advanced manufacturing and drug development, expected to create 13,000 high-wage manufacturing and construction jobs and 500 new jobs at the Medicine Foundry. (Indianapolis, Indiana, USA — global deployment; GTC Washington D.C. announcement, October 2025)