Eli Lilly has launched LillyPod, an artificial intelligence supercomputing facility in Indianapolis built to accelerate pharmaceutical discovery and development, powered by 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra graphics processing units (GPUs) and delivering more than 9,000 petaflops of computing power.
Lilly describes LillyPod as the most powerful AI factory wholly owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company and the world's first NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to use DGX B300 systems, assembled in four months.
The facility handles 700 terabytes of data, supported by more than 290 terabytes of high-bandwidth GPU memory and nearly 5,000 network connections built with more than 1,000 pounds of fibre cables.
Lilly said LillyPod will support large-scale training of protein diffusion models, small-molecule graph neural network models and genomics foundation models, with workloads managed through NVIDIA's Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and Mission Control software.
Select models will be made available to researchers through Lilly TuneLab, a platform using federated learning, a technique that trains AI models across distributed datasets without centralising sensitive data, built on NVIDIA FLARE and incorporating models from both Lilly and NVIDIA BioNeMo.
The company said the proprietary data used to build some of the models cost more than $1 billion to assemble.
Internal platforms will allow Lilly employees to build chatbots, agentic workflows and research lab agents without reconstructing core tools from scratch.
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Diogo Rau, executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Lilly, described the inauguration as a milestone built on 150 years of the company's history.
Lilly said it aims to power LillyPod entirely on renewable electricity by 2030.
The recap
- Lilly launches LillyPod AI factory in Indianapolis, company announcement.
- LillyPod uses 1,016 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and 9,000 petaflops.
- Company aims for 100% renewable electricity for infrastructure by 2030.
