Nelson Advisors featured in Yahoo! Finance - 'AI giants lean into healthcare to stall public backlash'

Nelson Advisors has been featured in Yahoo! Finance for the story  'AI giants lean into healthcare to stall public backlash.'

Source: https://finance.yahoo.com/healthcare/articles/ai-giants-lean-health-care-093009820.html

Driving the news: The Wall Street Journal reported this month that Anthropic was trying to shore up investor confidence ahead of its massive initial public offering with talk of pushing harder into health care and biology.

CEO Dario Amodei wrote on X that Anthropic is moving quickly in biology and medicine "and we hope to have incredible results in the coming years and some early glimmers in the coming months."
Anthropic isn't alone: Nvidia and Eli Lilly are building a $1 billion drug discovery lab in San Francisco that will team up life science researchers with AI model builders and engineers.

Isomorphic Labs, the AI drug discovery spinoff from Google, recently raised $2.1 billion to hire more AI and clinical talent and has ongoing research collaborations with Novartis, Lilly and Johnson & Johnson.
Yes, but: Breakthroughs may still be years away. That's hardly reassuring to an increasingly anxious U.S. public that's gone NIMBY against data centers, with moratoriums, threatened lawsuits and fears of AI models taking more jobs.

Between the lines: AI's push into health care comes as frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI prepare to go public to help cover the huge cost of training new models and maintaining multi-gigawatt computing infrastructures.

Moving into the life sciences is a way to both diversify the companies' revenue streams and reshape public sentiment, said Lloyd Price, a partner at Nelson Advisors, a digital health M&A firm.

"It's a bit of a hearts-and-minds play ... the bad guys are stealing all of the resources but they could help humanity. The truth is very in the middle," Price told Axios.

Price said real medical advances could transform people's perception of AI from an environmental and security risk into an essential public utility.

The bottom line: AI labs will need to prove they're bringing measurable benefits to society, not just satisfying investors. The question is whether the public will put up with more server farms in their backyards to get there.

"What I hear a lot is, where is the material contribution or breakthrough that's directly led to a drug discovery? It's a team sport, and AI is just a player on the field," Price said.