BMS Harnesses NVIDIA AI to Discover New Drugs

Bristol Myers Squibb has substantially grown its AI capabilities over recent years to accelerate drug discovery outcomes. Credit: Bristol Myers Squibb.

The biopharmaceutical leader Bristol Myers Squibb is scaling its NVIDIA compute capacity to build what it calls the most powerful privately owned AI system in the life sciences industry.

Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) is expanding its NVIDIA-powered AI infrastructure to create what it describes as the 'most powerful AI factory in the life sciences'.

BMS already operates one of the most powerful AI systems in the life sciences industry, also powered by advanced NVIDIA technology, to support its research and development programs.

This second system will deliver up to ten times better performance per megawatt compared to its predecessor.

The system will deploy an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD featuring DGX Vera Rubin NVL72 systems, creating the most powerful and energy-efficient privately owned NVIDIA infrastructure in the life sciences industry.

Greg Meyers, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb, says: “BMS has made a deliberate bet on AI, and we are beginning to see it pay off in our pipeline and operations. We are committed to translating AI into real outcomes for patients, which requires infrastructure built to match that ambition.

“Expanding our compute capabilities with NVIDIA gives our researchers and teams across the business the scale they need to keep BMS at the leading edge of what AI can do for drug discovery and development.”

Greg Meyers, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb. Credit: Bristol Myers Squibb.

Accelerating Drug Discovery with Generative AI

AI-enabled drug discovery is one of the leading use cases for generative AI in healthcare. BMS has been at the forefront of this movement since building its first NVIDIA-powered DGX SuperPOD three years ago.

AI agents that automate target identification and validation save researchers weeks of manual work, allowing them to focus on higher-value scientific decisions.

The company's 'Predict First' approach uses AI to guide experimental design before laboratory testing, informing every small-molecule program and most large-molecule programs as part of an integrated drug development strategy.

Robert Plenge, Executive VP and Chief Research Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb, says: “Drug discovery is a sequence of decisions made under uncertainty, and better decisions come from better evidence, faster.

“This infrastructure lets us learn from every experiment and every clinical readout to sharpen the next hypothesis, allowing BMS scientists to spend less time on manual work and more time on the questions that require human judgment.

“The goal isn’t speed for its own sake; it’s raising the probability that each program we advance is the right one.”

Robert Plenge, Executive Vice President and Chief Research Officer at Bristol Myers Squibb. Credit: Bristol Myers Squibb.

Improving Research Workflows

The expanded agreement supports the company’s research vision of 'hybrid intelligence', where AI co-scientists work alongside human researchers to improve workflows and outcomes.

AI systems at BMS handle complex, data-intensive tasks, allowing scientists to focus on strategy, interpretation, and decisions that require human expertise.

The cluster provides the computing power behind this approach, supporting foundation models trained on decades of proprietary data, and facilitates AI-driven workflows that allow researchers to test hypotheses at a scale previously impossible.

Rory Kelleher, Senior Director of Business Development, Healthcare and Life Sciences at NVIDIA, says: “BMS has built decades of extraordinary scientific knowledge across some of the most complex areas of human disease.

“With NVIDIA Vera Rubin and BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, BMS can transform that enterprise scientific data into proprietary intelligence and give agents domain-specific tooling that helps scientists explore biology, design molecules, and evaluate hypotheses at an unprecedented scale – reinventing how medicines are discovered and developed.”

Expanding the Enterprise AI Ecosystem

BMS’s expanding AI infrastructure follows its strategic partnership with Anthropic, announced in May 2026.

The AI firm’s Claude agent is set to be deployed across research, clinical development, manufacturing, commercial, and corporate functions.

Aiming to transition AI use from conversational tools to agentic capabilities built into day-to-day workflows, the BMS-Claude partnership aims to accelerate software engineering with Claude Code.

It embeds agents into workflows that move drugs forward and connects Claude with institutional knowledge across internal systems.

Anthropic also launched Claude Science, a dedicated product tailored to the demands of the life sciences industry.