Illumina

Illumina is a San Diego company (NASDAQ: ILMN) that makes DNA sequencing instruments, the chemistry kits each run consumes, and the software that turns raw reads into genetic findings. It appears here not as an AI vendor or an AI adopter but as a data and instrument supplier to AI: its machines generate a large share of the genomic data that biology AI models are trained on. It also ships AI of its own: machine-learning models built into its analysis software, not a standalone AI product.

Its defining pattern is data-supplier: turning sequencing capacity into datasets that drugmakers use to train models. In October 2025 it created a business unit called BioInsight to build data assets, software and AI tools for drug discovery. Its first product, announced in January 2026, is the Billion Cell Atlas, which the company calls the world's largest genome-wide genetic perturbation dataset. It uses the gene-editing tool CRISPR to switch genes on and off in more than 200 disease-relevant cell lines and records how one billion cells respond, the first stage of a program the company says will reach five billion. AstraZeneca, Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly joined as founding participants, and in July 2026 three more companies joined, including the AI-native drug developer Formation Bio. Illumina then said over 350 million cells had been sequenced.

The AI Illumina ships itself is interpretation software. PrimateAI-3D, unveiled in June 2023 alongside two papers in Science, is a deep learning model trained on sequencing data from 233 species of nonhuman primates to predict which human mutations cause disease. PromoterAI, published in Science in May 2025, looks for harmful variants in the promoter regions that switch genes on; Illumina says such variants account for up to six percent of the genetic causes of rare diseases, and that combined with PrimateAI-3D and its splicing model SpliceAI, its tools roughly double diagnostic yield compared with protein-truncating variants alone. Its Dragen analysis software runs a machine-learning filter on variant calls by default. In January 2025 it announced a collaboration with NVIDIA to run Dragen on NVIDIA graphics processors and let customers fine-tune NVIDIA's biology foundation models on their own data.

Illumina completed the spin-off of the cancer-screening company Grail in June 2024, keeping about 14.5 percent of its shares. In January 2026 it closed the purchase of the protein-measurement company SomaLogic from Standard BioTools for 350 million dollars in cash, with up to 75 million dollars more tied to earnouts. In February 2025 China added Illumina to its unreliable entity list and in March 2025 barred it from exporting sequencers to China; that ban was lifted in November 2025, but Illumina remains on the list and each sale needs case-by-case approval.

The honest framing: Illumina's value still rests on selling sequencers and the consumables every run uses; AI is a lever on top that raises demand for sequencing and adds data revenue. The Billion Cell Atlas is still being built, and no published result shows that models trained on it find better drug targets; the PrimateAI-3D and PromoterAI gains are peer-reviewed research whose clinical impact depends on adoption. Its peers play different roles: NVIDIA supplies the computing, Tempus AI pairs diagnostic testing with a clinical data business, Owkin builds models on patient data from hospital partners, and Roche competes with it in sequencing. Illumina's bet is to own the machine that makes the data, and now the data itself.