Novo Nordisk is the latest pharmaceutical major to partner directly with a high-tech giant to advance AI in their operations, including for drug development, manufacturing, and the supply chain. A roundup of the latest partnerships and projects.

Making the connections: Big Pharma and AI
Novo Nordisk announced this week (April 14, 2026) a strategic partnership with OpenAI, the multi-billion dollar AI research and deployment company, to integrate OpenAI’s AI capabilities globally from drug discovery to commercial operations. OpenAI will assist Novo Nordisk in upskilling the company’s global workforce and enhancing AI literacy. The partnership will also apply OpenAI’s capabilities to improve efficiency in manufacturing, supply chain and distribution, and corporate operations. Pilot programs will launch across research & development, manufacturing and commercial operations, with full integration by the end of 2026. The move builds on Novo Nordisk’s current AI initiatives, which include collaboration with varied technology partners and research organizations to build the company’s AI capabilities.

OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company that developed the GPT family of large language models recognized for catalyzing widespread interest in generative AI. Last month (March 2026), the company raised $122 billion in committed capital at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. The round was anchored by the company’s strategic partners Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, with continued participation from its long-term partner, Microsoft. This week (April 16, 2026), OpenAI launched GPT‑Rosalind, a reasoning model built to support research across biology, drug discovery, and translational medicine. OpenAI says it is working with customers, such as Amgen, Moderna, the Allen Institute (s a non-profit, bioscience research institute co-founded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft), Thermo Fisher Scientific, and others to apply GPT‑Rosalind across workflows that accelerate research and discovery.

Other pharma partnerships in AI
Other pharmaceutical majors have partnered with OpenAI and other high-tech giants in AI. In 2024, Eli Lilly and Company partnered with OpenAI to apply OpenAI’s generative AI to invent novel antimicrobials to treat drug-resistant pathogens. Lilly’s largest partnership, however, came this year, when in January (January 2026), Lilly and Nvidia the high-tech giant and producer of graphics processing units, systems on chips, and application programming interfaces for data science, high-performance/accelerated computing, and AI, announced an AI co-innovation lab focused on applying AI to the pharmaceutical industry, in a deal worth up to $1 billion.

The lab brings together Lilly’s expertise in discovering, developing, and manufacturing medicines with Nvidia’s leadership in AI, accelerated computing, and AI infrastructure. The two companies will invest up to $1 billion in talent, infrastructure and computing over five years to support the new AI co-innovation lab. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, the lab will co-locate Lilly domain experts in biology, science and medicine with AI model builders and engineers from Nvidia, allowing them to generate large-scale data and build AI models that can accelerate medicine development, using Nvidia’s BioNeMo as the platform. The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This initiative expands on Lilly’s previously announced AI supercomputer as well as the AI factory Lilly announced last fall (fall 2025).

Last month (May 2026), Roche announce the launch of a large-scale AI factory powered by Nvidia to support Roche’s vision of building an AI-accelerated healthcare organization. This computational expansion marks the next phase of a strategic collaboration with Nvidia that the companies started in 2023. Featuring 2,176 GPUs on premises across the United States and Europe and embedded across the entire value chain, this infrastructure is designed to accelerate the development of diagnostics and therapeutics. With this most recent investment, Roche’s combined on-premise and cloud GPU infrastructure now exceeds 3,500 Blackwell GPUs. 

This week (April 14, 2026), Anthropic, an AI research company and competitor to OpenAI, announced that Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, has been appointed to Anthropic’s Board of Directors.

“Working across medicine, innovation, and global health has shown me the transformative potential of technology when deployed responsibly. In healthcare, AI is accelerating solutions to some of the hardest scientific challenges, from deepening our understanding of disease biology to designing better medicines,” said Narasimhan, in a April 14, 2026, Anthropic press release. “Anthropic is setting the standard for how AI should be developed to benefit humanity, and I’m honored to join the Board and contribute to its mission.”

Earlier this month (April 2026), Anthropic signed a new agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of tensor processing unit (TPU) capacity that is expected to come online starting in 2027 to expand its compute infrastructure to power Claude, a family of large language models. In February (February 2026), Anthropic reported that it had raised $30 billion in Series G funding at a $380-billion post-money valuation.

Novartis has several partnerships focused on AI for drug discovery and development with specialized companies, including those backed by large technology companies. In early 2024, Novartis formed a research collaboration, which it later expanded in 2025, with Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI firm focused on drug discovery and design. Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 with a focus on the application of AI in drug discovery by CEO Demis Hassabis, who is also co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind and 2024 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry who was recognized for his work on protein structure prediction. AlphaFold is an AI system developed by Google DeepMind that predicts a protein’s 3D structure from its amino acid sequence. Both Ismorphic Labs and Google DeepMind are backed by Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

In 2024, Sanofi, OpenAI, and Formation Bio, a New York-based AI and tech-driven drug developer with its own pipeline of drug assets, formed a collaboration to build AI-powered software to accelerate drug development. One tool developed from that collaboration is Muse, an advanced AI-powered tool developed to accelerate and improve drug development by optimizing patient recruitment for clinical trials. Both Sanofi and Formation Bio said in announcing the tool in late 2024 plans to  implement Muse in upcoming clinical trials, with Sanofi leading the initial deployment in Phase III studies for multiple sclerosis. Formation Bio’s business model is to acquires and advances drug assets using proprietary AI systems to identify promising drug candidates, optimize program design, and streamline clinical trials. Last year (April 2025), Mikael Dolsten, MD, PhD, former Chief Scientific Officer and President, Pfizer Research & Development joined Formation Bio as Chair of the company’s Drug Picking Committee, Co-Chair of the Investment Advisory Committee, and Chair of Science, Technology, and Product Planning Committee.

Specialized partnerships
The large pharma companies are also investing in AI-based drug development through partnerships with smaller pharma companies that apply their AI-based capabilities in large partnering deals. In 2024, Novartis formed a deal, worth up to $1.1 billion ($65 million upfront, which included $15 million in equity and up to $1 billion in milestone payments) with Generate:Biomedicines, a Somerville, Massachusetts-based bio/pharmaceutical company applying a proprietary system applying AI and machine learning to design and optimize proteins for therapeutic applications, with a focus on immunology, oncology, and infectious diseases.

Late last year (December 2025), Novartis formed a partnership, with up to $1.7 billion, with Relation Therapeutics, a UK-based bio/pharmaceutical company developing medicines across immunology, metabolic and bone diseases using AI and experimental systems, to discover and advance novel targets for atopic diseases. The collaboration pairs Relation’s AI-powered drug-discovery platform and human data generation capabilities with Novartis’s expertise in immuno-dermatology to identify, validate, and advance targets in atopic diseases driven by immune dysregulation. Under the deal, Relation receives $55 million, comprising an upfront payment, equity investment, and additional R&D funding and is eligible to receive preclinical, development, regulatory, and commercial sales milestones of up to $1.7 billion, along with tiered royalties on net sales of products resulting from the collaboration.

Merck & Co. is applying internally built AI capabilities as well as using partnerships in building its capabilities set in AI in drug discovery and development. Last year (June 2025), the company reported that it had implemented a new internal generative-AI-powered platform to reduces the time needed to produce clinical study documents. The company applied large language models to expedite the creation of first drafts of clinical study reports from two to three weeks to three to four days. Merck reported that it was in process of scaling this platform across its late-phase pipeline.

Among its partnerships, Merck is partnered with Variational AI, a Vancouver, Canada-based generative AI drug-discovery company under a deal worth up to $349 million, announced last year (2025), to apply Variational AI’s Enki platform to design and optimize novel small-molecule candidates against two undisclosed targets. In March (March 2026), Merck announced a research and development agreement with the Mayo Clinic to apply AI, advanced analytics and multimodal clinical data to support drug discovery and development. In addition, the company earlier this year (March 2026) expanded its collaboration with Tempus AI aimed at accelerating the discovery and development of precision medicine biomarkers supporting Merck’s oncology and potentially broader therapeutic portfolios.