Lab image courtesy of Merck & Co.
Drugmaker Merck & Co. is committing up to $1 billion over the next decade-plus to make Google Cloud its primary AI anchor, the companies announced Wednesday at Google’s Cloud Next conference in Las Vegas. The deal covers AI infrastructure, engineers, and licensing of Google’s Gemini Enterprise platform, with Google Cloud staff embedded alongside Merck teams.
The Google agreement, which the firms expect to last a decade or more, caps a flurry of early-2026 dealmaking for Merck. In just the first few months of the year, Merck has aligned with Guardant Health, Illumina’s Billion Cell Atlas, the Mayo Clinic and Tempus. That builds on top of 2025 work with Variational AI and Turbine and a KERMT small-molecule model co-developed with Nvidia.
Merck’s AI stack appears to be among the most complex in top-10 pharma. The Google Cloud pact could offer some degree of synthesis as it will span its discovery research, regulatory processes, manufacturing and commercial operations, as Reuters notes.
Merck’s burgeoning digital transformation play comes as Keytruda, Merck’s PD-1 blockbuster, is facing a loss of exclusivity around 2028. For context, Keytruda did $31.68B in FY2025 per Merck’s 10-K, up from $29.48B in FY2024. That’s a roughly 7.5% YoY growth rate on a drug that drives close to half of Merck’s revenue.
Dave Williams, Merck’s chief information and digital officer, alluded to the pressure in describing the Google Cloud deal, saying the company is entering “one of the most significant launch periods in our company’s history.”
Merck’s Google push extends an AI buildout that has been underway for several years. In June 2025, the company said an internal generative AI platform had cut the time needed to produce first drafts of clinical study reports from two to three weeks to three to four days. Merck also said that its AI push reduced average drafting effort from 180 hours to 80 hours and cut errors by 50%. Beyond documentation, Merck has also used AI in manufacturing through its HawkAVI platform on AWS, which the company says reduced false reject rates by 50%, and in discovery through models such as KERMT, a small-molecule model Merck developed with Nvidia and made available through BioNeMo and Clara Open Models.
| Initiative / Partner | Date | Overview | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| An overview of Merck & Co.’s internal AI stack | |||
| GPTeal | Active (Jun 2025 update) | Internal GenAI platform (>50k users). Reduces clinical study report drafting time by over 70% and errors by 50%. | Business Insider |
| KERMT (w/ Nvidia) | Active | Open-source small-molecule model trained on >11M molecules; available via Nvidia BioNeMo/Clara. | Merck.com |
| TEDDY (w/ BCG X) | Mar 2025 | Family of foundation models for single-cell biology built with BCG X AI Science Institute. | BCG Global |
| Merck’s enterprise infrastructure | |||
| Google Cloud | Apr 2026 | Up to $1B partnership deploying Gemini Enterprise and dedicated engineers across corporate/R&D functions. | Merck.com |
| AWS / Accenture | Since 2021 | Cloud migration and manufacturing modernization. HawkAVI platform reduced false reject rates by ~50%. | Accenture |
| Azure / Microsoft | 2022 | Ecosystem support lane; provided cloud computing backbone for startups via the Merck Digital Sciences Studio. | Merck.com |
| Core strategic AI partners | |||
| Open Targets Consortium | Apr 2024 | Consortium participation supporting identification, prioritization, and validation of drug targets. | Open Targets |
| Owkin | Dec 2023 | AI-powered digital pathology diagnostics (EU market), initially focusing on MSI-H pre-screening. | Merck.com |
| BCG | May 2024 | GenAI collaboration to mine omics data for novel drug targets in chronic/degenerative diseases. | BCG Global |
| Variational AI | Sep 2025 | Enki-based GenAI collaboration targeting two designated small-molecule targets. | Variational AI |
| Turbine | Aug 2025 | AI-driven simulated cell and tumor models designed for hard-to-treat cancers. | Turbine AI |
| Illumina Billion Cell Atlas | Jan 2026 | Founding participant in a mass perturbation-data effort to fuel AI-model training and target validation. | Illumina |
| Guardant Health | Jan 2026 | Multi-year companion diagnostics and commercialization agreement tied to Merck oncology. | Guardant |
| Mayo Clinic | Feb 2026 | Combining Merck’s AI/ML capabilities with Mayo’s clinical, imaging, and genomic datasets for drug discovery. | Merck.com |
| Tempus | Mar 2026 | Expanded multi-year AI-driven precision medicine and biomarker discovery collaboration. | Tempus AI |
| Quotient Therapeutics | Mar 2026 | Somatic-genomics platform deal focusing on target discovery for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). | Quotient Tx |
| Infinimmune | Mar 2026 | Multi-target human antibody discovery collaboration. | Merck.com |
| Other discovery and design partners | |||
| BigHat Biosciences | Nov 2022 | ML-guided antibody discovery spanning up to three programs. | BigHat Bio |
| Absci | Jan 2022 | AI-powered drug creation platform specifically applied to proteins and enzymes. | Merck.com |
| Merck Digital Sciences Studio | Jun 2022 | Healthcare startup funnel backed by Azure; provides ecosystem context rather than direct pipeline creation. | Merck.com |
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