Novo Nordisk named Amazon Web Services its preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner on Aug. 10, establishing a London-based AI co-innovation hub to accelerate drug discovery. The partnership aims to compress the path from drug target to first human dose using AWS services including Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock.
Novo Nordisk named AWS its preferred cloud and AI partner Aug. 10, targeting faster drug discovery across 25,000 employees.
"Partnering with AWS is about making AI a driver of innovation across Novo Nordisk," Mike Doustdar, president and CEO of Novo Nordisk, said. "By combining our scientific expertise with AWS' tools and purpose-built services for the life sciences industry, we are accelerating discovery and developing responsible AI solutions that will create real progress for people living with serious chronic diseases."
The agreement creates a London AI co-innovation hub where AWS engineers and AI specialists work alongside Novo Nordisk R&D teams. The companies will use Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock to identify drug targets, design therapies faster and connect genomic, imaging and clinical data so early research can shape clinical trial design. Novo Nordisk will also deploy Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to drive efficiencies through AI agents. The collaboration has already reduced clinical documentation time and enabled more than 25,000 employees to boost productivity.
The agreement builds on a multi-year relationship between the two companies and extends beyond research. Novo Nordisk also works with Amazon Pharmacy, Amazon Ads and Amazon One Medical to transform how new therapies are marketed and delivered to patients. AWS CEO Matt Garman said the partnership aims to "compress drug discovery timelines, securely process complex datasets and scale findings across therapeutic areas."
Novo Nordisk employs about 66,700 people in 80 countries and markets products in around 170 countries. The company, founded in 1923 and headquartered in Denmark, focuses on chronic diseases including diabetes and obesity.
The AWS partnership is part of a broader AI push at Novo Nordisk. The company has also partnered with NVIDIA on computing and simulation and with OpenAI on drug discovery, manufacturing and supply chain operations. Novo Nordisk was named an early collaborator on GPT-Rosalind, OpenAI's first model built for biological reasoning.
The pharma industry is increasingly turning to AI partnerships. Eli Lilly signed 16 AI partnerships in 2025 and followed with a $1 billion agreement with NVIDIA in 2026, while Sanofi has pursued its own multi-vendor AI strategy. For Novo Nordisk, the AWS agreement shows a bet that AI can meaningfully compress the drug development cycle, which typically spans 10-15 years from target identification to market approval.
The next test will be how quickly the London hub translates AI-driven discoveries into clinical candidates and whether the productivity gains extend beyond documentation into actual pipeline acceleration. Novo Nordisk's broader AI portfolio, spanning NVIDIA simulation tools, OpenAI models and now AWS infrastructure, suggests the company is building capabilities across the computing spectrum rather than betting on a single vendor.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
