(Reuters) -Chip designer Nvidia will invest $50 million to speed up training of Recursion’s artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, the companies said on Wednesday, sending the biotech firm’s shares surging about 62%.
Recursion, whose advisers include AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, will use its biological and chemical datasets exceeding 23,000 terabytes to train AI models on Nvidia’s cloud platform.
Nvidia, seen as a big winner of the boom in artificial intelligence, could then license those models to biotech firms through BioNeMo, a generative AI cloud service for drug discovery that it rolled out earlier this year.
It was not clear whether Nvidia will take a stake in Recursion. The drug developer did not immediately respond to a request seeking clarification.
The biopharma company runs the Recursion OS platform that gives drugmakers access to datasets required for designing and developing therapeutics.
The investment comes as Recursion strengthened its AI focus in May by snapping up two companies in the AI-driven drug discovery space for $87.5 million.
Recursion plans to use Nvidia’s software to support its own pipeline, as well as its partners’. The Salt Lake City, Utah-based company’s current partners include Bayer and Roche.
Recursion is conducting human trials for five of its drugs, including a candidate that is in mid-stage trials to treat a type of neurovascular disease caused by malformation of small blood vessels in the brain.
Other prominent backers of the biotech include Abu Dhabi’s sovereign investor Mubadala and UK-based investment firm Baillie Gifford & Co.
Recursion’s shares were up at $10.99 in late morning trading in heavy volumes. They were on track for their best day ever since listing in 2021, if current gains hold through the session.
(Reporting by Chavi Mehta in Bengaluru and Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Mariam Sunny in Bengaluru; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar and Sriraj Kalluvila)
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