Executives of the Year: Diogo Rau

Lilly now treats computing power as a core part of making medicines—thanks in large part to chief information and digital officer Diogo Rau. Under his leadership, the pharmaceutical giant built LillyPod, an Nvidia-powered supercomputer with more than 1,000 Blackwell GPUs, in just four months. That supercomputer is now modeling biological processes and screening potential molecules before promising candidates enter wet lab experiments. 

Rau has also deployed tech in the company’s approach to manufacturing. His team built an AI-assisted digital twin of a bottleneck in Lilly’s production process, testing a slew of temperature and pressure variables virtually. The initiative shaved minutes from a critical process, Rau says, and enabled a “very large” increase in units produced—enough to have had a material impact on earnings.

Rau’s bigger bet is that drug-making itself is becoming computational; he believes the shift will ultimately change what being a scientist looks like in practice. “I don’t think anybody thinks that in 10 years we’ll have just as many scientists working in wet labs,” he says.