Absci Oracle AMD AI Drug Discovery Collaboration

Absci, a biotech company utilizing generative AI for drug discovery, has formed a strategic partnership with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and AMD to expedite the development of biologics. The primary objective of this collaboration is to streamline drug design processes and reduce expenses by integrating Absci’s AI platform with cloud infrastructure and powerful GPUs.

For readers of eeNews Europe, this alliance underscores the significant role that cloud infrastructure and advanced GPUs play in propelling AI workloads into uncharted territories beyond conventional IT. This development holds great importance for the semiconductor, cloud computing, and AI technology sectors in Europe and globally.

Advancing AI-powered biologics design

Absci has opted for OCI as the foundation for constructing and expanding its AI models, which encompass a wide range of applications from extensive molecular-dynamics simulations to complete antibody design workflows. By incorporating AMD’s latest Instinct MI355X GPUs into the equation, the company asserts that it can further enhance the performance and scalability of its Drug Creation Platform.

“Our goal is to redefine the boundaries of therapeutic design,” stated Sean McClain, the founder and CEO of Absci. “Through our collaboration with OCI and AMD, we are combining our state-of-the-art AI models with top-tier infrastructure. This partnership accelerates our ability to introduce innovative therapeutics to patients while establishing the technological groundwork for the next era of AI-driven drug discovery workflows.”

The platform operates on OCI bare-metal instances equipped with 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors and RDMA cluster networking, which facilitates low-latency GPU access and high throughput. According to Absci, this configuration reduces inter-GPU latency to as little as 2.5 µs and enables terabytes-per-second data streaming—capabilities that are crucial for training complex models and refining antibody-antigen interactions.

Support from cloud and silicon giants for AI in healthcare

Executives from Oracle and AMD have positioned this partnership as a testament to how advancements in cloud technology and chip innovation are driving progress in the field of biotechnology.

“Absci’s generative AI-powered drug discovery represents the type of groundbreaking workflow that OCI was designed to support,” remarked Dan Spellman, the vice president of AI and OCI, Healthcare & Life Sciences at Oracle. “By integrating bare-metal GPUs, OCI Compute E6 instances, ultrafast RDMA networking, and high-performance storage, we are furnishing the consistent performance and close engineering collaboration that Absci requires to push the boundaries of biologics design.”

“Absci is showcasing how AI has the potential to revolutionize the pace of drug discovery, and we are honored to contribute to that mission,” added Ram Peddibhotla, the corporate vice president of Data Center GPU Cloud Business at AMD. “Through the fusion of OCI with AMD EPYC CPUs, AMD Instinct GPUs, and our open ROCm software platform, this collaboration delivers the performance and scalability necessary to advance intricate biologics design and facilitate more efficient discovery workflows.”