Executive Summary
Eli Lilly’s AI factory is seeing strong usage as it runs experiments at scale, and the company has saved on token expenditures by maintaining control over its models and data.
Speaking at CoreWeave’s Fully Connected 2026 conference, Brian Lewis, head of machine learning engineering and advanced intelligence at Lilly, walked through the AI stack that powers the company’sresearch efforts. Lewis’ talk touched on multiple key issues in AI right now, including sovereignty, governance, and open models that can be tailored, creating new ways of working for the 12,000 people in pharmaceutical research and development at Lilly.
Lilly announced its AI factory, called LillyPod, in February, along with its plans to transform its research operations. Lilly’s AI factory, powered by Nvidia, is currently the most powerful supercomputer in the pharmaceutical industry. LillyPod features Nvidia DGX B300 SuperPOD and includes 1,016 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
The pharmaceutical giant said it is using its own data, including information about millions of molecules, to tune models. Lilly also has Lilly TuneLab, which is an AI drug discovery platform that runs on the AI factory. In addition, Lilly’s AI factory runs disconnected from the internet
