Christian Hein · 4 November 2025 · 1 min read
Pharma used to rent compute. Eli Lilly and Company just bought the factory.
Eli Lilly just moved from renting compute to owning it — 1,000+ Blackwell B300 GPUs in an on-prem DGX SuperPOD in Indianapolis. Their TuneLab initiative could turn R&D IT from a cost center into a deal channel, and it's further proof that pharma is finally taking AI seriously.
Pharma used to rent compute. Eli Lilly and Company just bought the factory.
More than 1,000 Blackwell B300 GPUs in an on-prem DGX SuperPOD, in Indianapolis, running on renewables.
The other story here is TuneLab: selected biotechs get Lilly's models at no cost, Lilly gets their data back, privacy kept via federation.
If this flies (and that's a big if), "R&D IT" turns into a deal channel, not a cost center.
That said, I find this approach truly intriguing by Lilly and it is further proof that Pharma is finally starting to take AI seriously, and is even willing to re-think discovery business models.
Filed under AI in Pharma
Artificial Intelligence · Large Pharma · Innovation Management · Partnership / Alliance · Synthetic Data · Strategic Planning · Pre-clinical research
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