Novo Nordisk expanded its AI deal with AWS to speed drug discovery. The company aims to have an AI-designed drug in human trials by 2026 as big pharma races for compute and talent.
Novo Nordisk widened its artificial intelligence partnership with Amazon Web Services, a move the Danish drugmaker said is aimed at cutting the time it takes to identify new drug candidates. The expanded deal gives Novo access to AWS's generative AI tools for protein design and clinical-trial data analysis.
The company already uses AWS for its drug-discovery platform, but the new agreement adds dedicated compute capacity and access to Amazon's Bedrock model library. Novo's head of digital science said the goal is to compress the early discovery phase from years to months.
The push comes as big pharma competes for AI talent and compute resources. Sanofi and Roche have similar deals with cloud providers. Novo's focus on obesity and diabetes treatments gives it a rich dataset to train models on, the company said.
Whether the technology actually accelerates drug development remains an open question. AI has helped design molecules faster, but clinical-stage failure rates have not yet fallen. Novo's internal target is to have at least one AI-discovered candidate in human trials by 2026.
The AWS agreement was announced alongside Novo's broader IT spending plan, which the company said will total roughly $3.5 billion over the next three years. A portion of that will go toward expanding its cloud infrastructure.
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