Illumina unveiled BioInsight, a business unit offering end‑to‑end sequencing and curated data products to pharmaceutical partners, including large, costly perturb‑seq projects. CEO Jacob Thaysen said Illumina will run and own complex sequencing experiments, provide initial exclusivity to sponsors, then repackage data for wider use — positioning the company as both a service provider and a data steward for AI model training. The move responds to pharma demand for high‑quality, annotated datasets that can feed foundation models and accelerate target discovery. Illumina cited Perturb‑seq experiments that can cost tens of millions of dollars and argued centralizing execution and analytics will speed R&D while monetizing datasets. Competitors including Ginkgo and Twist are pursuing similar data‑centric strategies. The shift raises questions about data ownership, exclusivity windows, and how pharma partners will balance near‑term research needs against longer‑term platform licensing and AI model access.