Illumina announced plans to expand beyond reagents and instruments by offering curated, high-value genomic datasets and analytics to pharmaceutical partners through a new BioInsight unit. The company will run sequencing-intensive projects for pharma, retain ownership of generated data, and grant temporary exclusivity to collaborators before opening datasets for broader use. Illumina framed the move as a way to accelerate complex, costly experiments—such as large Perturb‑seq screens—where costs can exceed tens of millions, and to provide AI-ready training data for foundation models of biology. The strategy parallels similar data-product moves by other genomics and synthetic-biology firms aiming to monetize proprietary data and analytics. The shift will affect how drug developers source large-scale genomic training sets and may reshape vendor relationships: pharma can outsource expensive experiments but must weigh data‑ownership, exclusivity windows, and long-term access for AI model training and internal R&D.