Novo Nordisk and AWS Partner on “AI Co-Innovation Hub”

A strategic partnership between Novo Nordisk and Amazon Web Services (AWS) aims to expedite drug discovery and modernise Novo Nordisk’s operations through agentic AI and cloud technologies. 

Central to the partnership is a “co-innovation hub” in London, where engineers, AI specialists, R&D teams and scientists from both firms will leverage AWS AI technologies alongside Novo Nordisk’s data and insights to shorten the timeline from initial drug target to first human dose.

“Partnering with AWS is about making AI a driver of innovation across Novo Nordisk,” says Mike Doustdar, President and CEO of Novo Nordisk.

“By combining our scientific expertise with AWS’ tools and purpose-built services for the life sciences industry, while also creating a dedicated co-innovation hub within our existing facility in London, we are accelerating discovery and developing responsible AI solutions that will create real progress for people living with serious chronic diseases.” 

A long-term cloud and AI partner

The agreement builds on a multi-year relationship between the two companies, dating back to early data infrastructure and drug discovery projects on AWS, and more recently a generative AI platform built on Amazon Bedrock. 

The ongoing partnership has already delivered measurable results, including reduced clinical documentation time and productivity gains for Novo Nordisk's more than 25,000 employees. 

The expanded agreement will see the two companies use services such as Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock to identify drug targets, accelerate the design of new therapies and connect genomic, imaging and clinical data – helping early research insights inform clinical trial design.

Novo Nordisk will also deploy Amazon Bedrock AgentCore to drive operational efficiencies through AI agents.

"Every part of our work with Novo Nordisk comes back to one thing: getting the right medicine to patients faster," says Matt Garman, CEO of AWS. 

"Novo Nordisk has chosen AWS as its strategic AI partner to fundamentally change how medicines are discovered and developed using services such as Amazon Bio Discovery and Amazon Bedrock.

"We’re excited to partner with Novo Nordisk so that these technologies, AWS Forward Deployed Engineers and Novo Nordisk’s industry-leading science teams can help compress drug discovery timelines, securely process complex datasets and scale findings across therapeutic areas.” 

Novo Nordisk’s AI portfolio

The renewed AWS partnership forms part of a string of strategic partnerships recently announced with major AI developers.

In 2025, Novo Nordisk announced a partnership with NVIDIA centring on computing and simulation, supporting its use of the Gefion sovereign AI supercomputer. The two companies aim to build customised AI models and agents for early research and clinical development, alongside advanced simulation and physical AI applications.

In April 2026, Novo Nordisk announced it will use OpenAI’s technologies to improve drug discovery, manufacturing, supply chain operations, commercial functions and employee training, with pilots running through to scaled deployment by late 2026. 

Novo Nordisk was also named an early collaborator on GPT-Rosalind, OpenAI's first model built specifically for biological reasoning.

The company's growing portfolio of AI partnerships suggests Novo Nordisk is building capabilities across the computing spectrum, including simulation, broad model access and secure cloud infrastructure. 

Novo Nordisk's AI strategy sits within an ever-evolving industry arms race. Eli Lilly alone signed 16 AI partnerships in 2025, and built on this momentum in 2026 with its US$1bn agreement with NVIDIA to build its own "co-innovation lab" alongside a US$2.75bn deal with Insilico Medicine, while Sanofi and other pharma giants have pursued their own multi-vendor AI strategies.