NVIDIA and Eli Lilly announced a joint $1 billion laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area to deploy AI at scale across drug discovery and development. The partnership will combine NVIDIA’s compute and AI stack with Lilly’s drug‑discovery programs to accelerate biologics and small‑molecule design and preclinical candidate selection. Lilly and NVIDIA framed the lab as a long‑term platform play rather than a single program partnership, with both sides committing capital and engineering resources. Separately, multiple pharma firms sealed platform deals with AI startups this month, shifting from pilot projects to broad, multi‑target collaborations. BioCentury and industry press report that companies including Lilly, GSK and Pfizer are signing platform‑level agreements to integrate AI models into discovery workflows, not just for single assets. These moves mark a step change from one‑off collaborations to enterprise deployment of computational drug discovery and regulatory translational pipelines. Why it matters: large‑scale compute partnerships and platform deals accelerate lead generation and de‑risk early discovery, shifting budget allocations from single assets to infrastructure. Expect hiring and procurement moves across AI, biology and regulatory teams as companies operationalize model‑driven discovery.