Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) price spring up Wednesday, on word the chipmaker will invest $50 million in Recursion Pharmaceuticals to speed up the development of the biotech firm’s artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, the companies said Wednesday.
Recursion’s stock soared 80% following the announcement. Shares of Nvidia, which have helped to fuel stock market gains this year amid hopes about its AI computing chips, rose more than 2%.
Recursion uses AI-powered models to identify and design new therapies, and offers those models to other drugmakers, including Roche
and Bayer.
Salt Lake City, Utah-based Recursion will use its biological and chemical datasets exceeding 23,000 terabytes to train its AI models on Nvidia’s cloud platform. AI models usually require vast amounts of data, typically measured in terabytes, to train them.
Nvidia can then potentially license those AI models on BioNeMo, the company’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery that it rolled out earlier this year.
Recursion expects to use BioNeMo to support its internal drug pipeline and those of its current and future partners. Recursion is conducting human trials for five of its drugs.
“Our collaboration with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery,” Recursion CEO Chris Gibson said in the release.
NVDA shares leaped $14.02, or 3.3%, to $438.06.
