Illumina Joins NVIDIA’s Agentic AI Vision at J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference
By Allison Proffitt
January 13, 2025 | Among the many partnerships and technical announcements made by NVIDIA during the company's Monday morning presentation at the 43rd Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, NVIDIA focused several on innovation within the healthcare and life sciences industry.
In a private press briefing last week, Kimberly Powell, VP of Healthcare at NVIDIA, cast NVIDIA’s vision for the AI Industrial Revolution and outlined the computing advancements that are enabling it.
For the first half of the last century, computing was done by humans, she explained. Compute code was written as serial instructions because that’s how humans think. But that has changed as large language models became the operating system of the computer.
Gone are the innovations of perceptive AI and generative AI, Powell said. AI is “very rapidly accelerating into agentic AI,” she said, AI that acts as an agent, not only perceiving, but reasoning, planning, and even taking action and performing tasks.” AI agents can use tools (tool calling), choose from accessible information, and collaborate with humans. “Agents are becoming, you could imagine them, digital employees,” she said. “It’s happening, really, seemingly overnight. And right around the corner… is physical AI where you have physical robots and the physical environment all operating and embodying AI in a physical world.”
The AI Industrial Revolution, she says, marks a shift. Data is now simply raw material. Tokens are the new commodity—with NVIDIA serving as the token generator. Under the new paradigm: “You introduce data, the machine learns from that data, it builds models, and then it writes software that executes on a GPU,” Powell explained. “We call this the AI Factory.”
AI factories are a new form of computing infrastructure, she said. “They’re purpose built to process raw data, refine them into models, and then produce tokens with great scale and efficiency.” Every company will produce digital intelligence through tokens, she said. Tokens, she defines, are “the intelligent response and actions of digital nurses or tutors or customer service agents, chip designers, even autonomous cars and weather prediction agents.”
Illumina to Bring Genomic Insights to NVIDIA Cloud
For the life sciences, NVIDIA’s agentic future vision involves a collaboration with Illumina. “This collaboration will combine Illumina’s world-leading sequencing technologies and their connected analytics program with all of NVIDIA’s Clara AI tools to develop and deploy foundation models that unluck the next generation of genomics insights, truly expanding the opportunities of genomics,” Powell said.
The partnership, Powell said, will revolutionize the analysis and interpretation of multi-omics data and will begin with Illumina’s DRAGEN software, which will now be available on NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform. This will broaden access to the platform, Powell said, highlighting it’s accessibility to “sovereign AI initiatives that are happening around the world.”
In addition, Powell said Illumina will integrate NVIDIA’s computing libraries and APIs including RAPIDS for single-cell analysis, BioNeMo for biology foundation models, and MONAI for spatial cell imaging workflows.
“Together, Illumina and NVIDIA are going to unlock new markets for genomics by making genomics insights—not just the data, but the insights—much more accessible and impactful, driving significant advancements in disease research and drug discovery,” Powell said.