Illumina launched its Billion Cell Atlas initiative, releasing massive single‑cell perturbation data across ~200 cell lines and aiming for one billion cells by year‑end. The company said the atlas will help pharma customers validate targets and build AI 'virtual cell' models; Merck, AstraZeneca and Eli Lilly are named early customers. CEO Jacob Thaysen framed the atlas as a commercial resource for drug discovery and cell‑based modeling. Separately, Tahoe Therapeutics, Arc Institute, and Biohub committed multimillion‑dollar funding to generate a perturbation‑heavy single‑cell dataset (over 120 million data points across 225,000 drug–patient interactions) to support virtual cell modeling. Tahoe will use its Mosaic platform to expand open datasets for AI training. Together, Illumina’s commercial atlas and Tahoe’s open‑science dataset illustrate industry and non‑profit investment in scaling single‑cell perturbation data to power predictive, model‑driven drug discovery and translational applications.