Bristol Myers Squibb said Monday it is expanding its partnership with NVIDIA by building what the company says will be the most powerful and energy-efficient NVIDIA artificial intelligence computing infrastructure owned by a life sciences company.
The Princeton-based pharmaceutical company will deploy NVIDIA's next-generation DGX SuperPOD with DGX Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, a move aimed at increasing the computing power available to its researchers while reducing energy consumption.
Bristol Myers said the new infrastructure will provide up to 10 times greater performance per megawatt than its previous system. The investment builds on a collaboration that began nearly three years ago when Bristol Myers first installed NVIDIA's AI computing platform to support research and development.
The company said the expanded computing capacity will help scientists develop larger and more sophisticated artificial intelligence models to accelerate drug discovery and development across several therapeutic areas, including cancer, blood disorders, cardiovascular disease, immunology and neuroscience.
Greg Meyers, Bristol Myers Squibb's chief digital and technology officer, said the company has made artificial intelligence a central part of its research strategy and is already seeing benefits in both its drug pipeline and business operations.
According to the company, AI tools are being used to automate tasks such as identifying and validating potential drug targets, reducing weeks of manual work for researchers. Bristol Myers also said AI now helps guide the design of every small-molecule drug program and most of its large-molecule programs before laboratory testing begins.
Robert Plenge, the company's chief research officer, said the expanded computing infrastructure will allow researchers to learn more quickly from laboratory experiments and clinical trial results, improving decisions about which drug candidates should advance through development.
Bristol Myers said the investment also supports its long-term strategy of combining human researchers with AI systems capable of handling complex, data-intensive scientific work. The company plans to use the new computing cluster to develop AI models trained on decades of proprietary research data while incorporating NVIDIA's BioNeMo platform for biological AI.
NVIDIA said the expanded partnership will allow Bristol Myers to apply its scientific data at a larger scale to help researchers study biology, design drug candidates, and evaluate potential therapies more efficiently.
Financial terms were not disclosed.
Image credit: Bristol Myers Squibb.
