BERLIN, March 16 (Reuters) - Swiss drugmaker Roche said on Monday it had expanded its artificial intelligence computing capacity with more than 2,100 Nvidia chips to support drug and diagnostics development.
Roche said the additional hardware would speed up work across its research and development operations, including modelling, data analysis and clinical trial processes.
The drugmaker said it had deployed 2,176 Nvidia Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) across sites in the U.S. and Europe, giving it the largest GPU footprint in the industry.
The build-up, which began in 2023, is part of a wider collaboration with Nvidia by Roche, which has been increasing investment in AI tools as large pharmaceutical groups compete to cut development timelines and reduce costs.
"In healthcare, time is the most critical variable," Chief Digital and Technology Officer Wafaa Mamilli said.
Drugmakers have announced a slew of deals for tools to unleash the promise of artificial intelligence, seen as the biggest technological breakthrough since the internet.
Agentic AI, which requires little human intervention, could increase clinical development productivity by about 35% to 45% over the next five years, consultancy McKinsey said last year.
(Reporting by Maggie Fick, Writing by Friederike Heine; Editing by Alexander Smith)
