Alphabet and Meta together reported a combined $118.5 billion in research and development spending for 2025, a sum that sits just below the $123.7 billion total recorded by the ten largest drugmakers by revenue.
Tech spending rivals the pharmaceutical sector
The pharmaceutical figure includes revenue-linked units such as Johnson & Johnson’s medtech division and Roche’s diagnostics business. While technology firms continue to expand their budgets, the pharmaceutical industry is forming new ties with those same companies.
In April, Merck & Co. announced a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud valued at up to $1 billion. At the time, the two organizations were spending similar amounts on research; Merck’s 2013 expense of $7.5 billion slightly exceeded Google’s $7.1 billion. By 2025, Alphabet’s outlay of $61.1 billion is nearly four times Merck’s $15.8 billion.
AI-driven supercomputers accelerate drug discovery
Eli Lilly launched the LillyPod supercomputer in Indianapolis after a four-month build. The system runs NVIDIA’s roughly 550-billion-parameter Nemotron 3 Ultra model without token limits, and a foundation model on the platform has already co-designed a small-molecule candidate featuring a novel chemical fragment.
Lilly and NVIDIA also announced a Bay Area co-innovation lab backed by up to $1 billion over five years. Roche added 2,176 Blackwell GPUs on site in March, bringing its total hardware count above 3,500 when cloud capacity is included. Bristol Myers Squibb is constructing a second NVIDIA supercomputer, following three years of operation with its first DGX SuperPOD.
AI firms deepen ties with life-science companies
Anthropic has opened a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area for physical biology experiments, though a spokesperson clarified that the space is not dedicated solely to drug discovery. The company also partnered with Basecamp Research on EDEN biological models for antibiotic discovery and vaccine design.
In a recent acquisition, Anthropic bought New York startup Coefficient Bio in a stock deal valued at just over $400 million, and added Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board. The firm markets its Claude model to pharma; in January, Genmab announced custom Claude-powered agents for clinical development, while BMS rolled Claude Enterprise out to more than 30,000 employees across research, development, manufacturing and commercial functions.
Novo Nordisk began testing Anthropic’s Claude Science platform in selected R&D workflows after earlier AI partnerships with OpenAI and Amazon Web Services. OpenAI introduced GPT-Rosalind, a life-sciences-focused model offered through a trusted-access program, with early adopters including Amgen and Moderna.
Alphabet’s own drug-discovery unit, Isomorphic Labs, secured $2.1 billion in funding in May and announced a research collaboration with Johnson & Johnson in January. The venture, which already counts Lilly and Novartis among its partners, has postponed its clinic entry target to the end of 2026.
