The AI boom’s biggest payoff could be better medicines

The AI boom has rapidly expanded from the digital to the physical. Chips, data centers, cloud infrastructure, and new sources of power are being built at extraordinary speed. But what valuable work will this capacity enable? At the World Economic Forum’s 2026 Annual Meeting in Davos, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang described AI as a five-layer stack: energy, chips, cloud infrastructure, models, and applications. The first four layers create the capacity. The application layer turns that capacity into products, services, and measurable outcomes. We think the value AI capacity will enable in two ways: The potential financial and societal return on invested capital. No single industry needs to carry the entire economics of the AI buildout. Returns will emerge across industries and through thousands of products. Yet few fields offer a clearer path from computational progress to economic value and human benefit than medicine. THE OPPORTUNITY FOR HEALTHCARE U.S. healthcare spending reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, or 18% of GDP, including $467 billion in prescription drugs. Only a fraction of that total is directly relevant to drug discovery, but the figures show how much money, labor, and human …