The drugmaker will deploy NVIDIA's Vera Rubin systems, giving it what it calls the most powerful AI computing infrastructure in life sciences
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Bristol Myers Squibb $BMY announced Monday it will expand its computing infrastructure by deploying an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD built on DGX Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, adding a second supercomputer cluster to its existing NVIDIA setup. The company said the new system delivers up to ten times greater performance per megawatt than the infrastructure it replaces.
The investment extends a partnership with NVIDIA that began roughly three years ago, when Bristol Myers Squibb first deployed a DGX SuperPOD to support its research and development operations, the company said. Financial terms were not disclosed.
Greg Meyers, Bristol Myers Squibb's chief digital and technology officer, said the investment was driven in part by growing demand for compute as the company deploys larger AI models across its research organization. "When you host these things, you have to pay an electric bill," Meyers told Reuters. "Think of it as 10 times more compute capacity per watt spent. Electricity is not getting cheaper."
Robert Plenge, Bristol Myers Squibb's chief research officer, said the additional computing power would let the company screen a far greater number of drug candidates in the earliest stages of development. "Maybe before we could do 10 and now we can do dozens," Robert Plenge told Reuters. He also noted that AI tools have already reduced the time needed to produce medicines for clinical testing by 20% to 30%, with Plenge suggesting that figure could climb as high as 50% over the next several years. Plenge also pointed to a specific example: a sickle cell disease drug candidate now in early-stage trials that he said AI-enabled research made possible to identify.
The new cluster will support the development of AI foundation models trained on Bristol Myers Squibb's proprietary data and will power agentic workflows across oncology, hematology, cardiovascular, immunology, and neuroscience programs, the company said. It will also draw on BioNeMo, NVIDIA's platform for biological AI.
Erin Davis, vice president of research business insights and technology at Bristol Myers Squibb, said the company's existing system is already saturated. "We're in production with some very large-scale predictions around large molecules," Davis told NVIDIA's blog. "We're building our own foundational models, and that takes a lot of GPUs."
The two systems will be combined into a unified environment accessible from every Bristol Myers Squibb site globally, the company said.
Bristol Myers Squibb has been expanding its AI infrastructure on multiple fronts. The company earlier struck a deal with Anthropic to give its workforce of more than 30,000 access to the Claude AI model, targeting faster progress across drug discovery, manufacturing, and commercial operations.
NVIDIA also has AI computing partnerships with Eli Lilly $LLY and Amgen $AMGN, according to Bloomberg.
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