AI chip maker Nvidia’s fresh partnerships with Eli Lilly and Johnson & Johnson point to a broader trend in the pharmaceutical industry, where tie-ups with AI giants are intended to speed up drug discovery and make work easier for health care workers.

“We want everything to move really, really fast and we want to get a new molecule that’s going to change the world in another six months,” says Diogo Rau, Eli Lilly’s chief information and digital officer. But despite that urgency, Rau acknowledges that science still takes time. New drug discovery can take well over a decade and well north of $2 billion, on average, before they can obtain regulatory approval.

Rau and Eli Lilly are betting that AI can speed things up. In late October, the company announced plans to create a new Nvidia-chip po

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