Pharmaceutical giants have started frenziedly snapping up chips.

On March 16th local time, Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche announced that it has deployed 2176 NVIDIA AI computing chips in multiple locations such as the United States and Europe, exceeding the scale of computing power at Lilly's AI factory earlier this month. Recently, Lilly announced that its AI pharmaceutical factory, LillyPod, has been put into operation, making it the world's first AI pharmaceutical factory fully operated by a pharmaceutical company. Lilly stated that the factory was assembled in just four months and equipped with over 1000 NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs to provide significant computing power for scientific research. Roche also stated that the deployment of over 2100 NVIDIA chips in its latest AI project will help expand the company's AI computing capabilities to support the development of drugs and diagnostics. "These hardware will accelerate R&D work, including modeling, data analysis, and clinical trial processes," said Roche. In recent years, major pharmaceutical companies have been increasing their investments in AI to shorten product development cycles and reduce costs. Giants like Roche, Lilly, AstraZeneca, and Pfizer have been acquiring promising AI tools through collaboration transactions. According to research firm Research&Markets, the global AI pharmaceutical market size exceeded 1 billion US dollars in 2022 and is projected to nearly reach 3 billion US dollars by 2026.