NVIDIA Corp. on Monday added healthcare and drug discovery to its expanding portfolio of artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions.
The gaming and GPU powerhouse, which outlined future plans in the autonomous AV and warehouse markets at CES last week, announced a series of AI partnerships at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco.
NVIDIA announced it is teaming with healthcare heavyweights, IQVIA (to accelerate drug and medical device development through NVIDIA’s AI Foundry service and agentic AI), Arc Institute (to speed up computational biomedical research via AI models), Illumina Inc. (unlocking the next generation of genomics insights with computing heft and AI toolsets), and Mayo Clinic (to accelerate AI-driven digital pathology through computing platforms powered by Blackwell architecture).
The solutions key on AI agents to accelerate clinical trials by lessening administrative tasks; AI models that learn from biology instruments to advance drug discovery and digital pathology; and physical AI robots for surgery, patient monitoring and operations.
“We’re going to write the next chapter in medical history,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at NVIDIA, said in a briefing with reporters. “Agentic AI and physical AI will revolutionize healthcare, increasing access and driving discovery.”
The news dovetails with what Daniel Newman, CEO of The Futurum Group, calls NVIDIA’s long-term plan to diversify beyond data centers, positioning itself as a leader in multiple sectors such as PCs, workstations, automotive, and physical AI (robotics). During NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote speech at CES last week, agentic AI was highlighted as a critical area for developers, leveraging NVIDIA’s CUDA/GPU ecosystem.
The $10 trillion global healthcare and life sciences industry represents one of the largest markets where NVIDIA is spreading its tentacles.
NVIDIA’s healthcare play comes amid a push by medical professionals to embrace AI to expedite appointments and general procedures. Startups with AI-powered robotics are filling a void caused by shortages in doctors to perform low-level dental tasks, eye exams, and minor surgeries.
“If you go back to 2017, 2018, people were talking about what AI can do for healthcare,” said Severence MacLaughlin, co-founder and CEO of DeLorean Artificial Intelligence, which predicts medical conditions. “It started with computer vision in radiology and a shortage in radiologists. Technology is easing the burden on understaffed, overworked doctors.”
Indeed, the potential for agentic coding will accelerate research and “massively impact how we bring new drugs to market,” Christian Olsen, vice president and industry principal of biologics at Dotmatics, said in an email.
“Two drug discovery areas are specifically important: 1) target identification and validation, 2) high-throughput screening,” Olsen said. “Agentic AI systems can autonomously analyze vast genomic and proteomic data sets to identify drug targets with high degrees of accuracy. That’s a big deal for the U.S. drug discovery market, where it takes 10 years and $2.5 billion on average to bring a new drug to market.”
While agentic AI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare, its success relies on interdisciplinary collaboration, proactive governance, and sustained trust, Medigram CEO Sherri Douville said in an email.
