Nvidia makes major investment in Ilya Sutskever’s $32 billion AI startup
The chip giant is backing Safe Superintelligence with capital and computing power as the former OpenAI scientist pursues a different path toward advanced AI.
Nvidia is making a substantial investment in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the artificial intelligence startup founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, as the chip giant deepens its involvement in the race to develop the next generation of AI systems.
The investment, combined with access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin computing platform, will allow SSI to increase its computing capacity by an order of magnitude, the companies said on Monday.
The partnership gives Nvidia a direct relationship with one of the industry’s most closely watched AI research efforts. SSI has operated largely behind closed doors since launching in 2024, but has already raised more than $3 billion at a valuation of $32 billion from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
For SSI, the deal addresses one of the biggest constraints facing frontier AI companies: access to enormous amounts of computing power. The company said it has spent the past two years developing a new research direction aimed at creating “safe superintelligence,” rather than following the industry’s prevailing focus on simply building larger models.
“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so,” Sutskever said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the partnership followed access to SSI’s closely guarded research.
“Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet,” Huang said. “We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform.”
