XtalPi: Accelerating drug discovery and development to offer more timely and affordable medical treatments

XtalPi, an AI-driven pharma tech company founded in 2014, runs massive computational workloads for drug-discovery algorithms for 150+ pharma partners (including most of the top 20) and needed to manage fluctuating demand, strict data security, and cost while operating across a multi-cloud environment. It adopted Google Cloud GPUs and, from mid-2022, Spot VMs for crystal-structure-prediction workloads, along with default encryption for multi-cloud data security. XtalPi reports 10,000+ available GPUs, a near-zero computing disruption rate, 4x faster network connections than its next-best competitor, an 8-hour delivery guarantee for GPU tasks, and a 10% reduction in computing costs; it supports roughly 200 drug-development projects, including Paxlovid's development. Drug Development Platform Director Chen Yongpan said Google Cloud "perfectly meets our computing requirements" while helping "realize better data security protection."

Google supplies AI to pharma through several distinct lines — Gemini/Vertex AI as an enterprise platform, and AlphaFold-based drug design licensed commercially through Isomorphic Labs.

This sits in the Build stage of the AI use-case lifecycle: Named examples from the foundation-model labs and platforms pharma teams use to actually construct, train and generate the model or application.