Nvidia has invested in Safe Superintelligence, or SSI, the AI lab founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to The Wall Street Journal. The companies have also entered a long-term partnership.
Nvidia and SSI said the chipmaker made a “large-scale” investment after learning about part of SSI’s research progress, but they did not disclose the amount. Under the agreement, SSI will receive substantial access to Nvidia’s flagship GPU resources, and its computing capacity is expected to increase by an order of magnitude.
Before the deal, SSI had mainly relied on Google-provided TPU chips for AI research and development. The partnership points to Nvidia’s continued push to expand its AI chip ecosystem while securing demand from a major AI lab.
SSI’s funding and focus
SSI was founded in 2024 by Ilya Sutskever with the goal of developing “safe superintelligence.” The company has previously raised about $2 billion, with Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital among its investors. Its valuation reached about $30 billion last year.
Nvidia has also backed another startup launched by a former OpenAI executive
This is not the first time Nvidia has invested in an AI company founded by a former core OpenAI figure. In March this year, Nvidia also invested in Thinking Machines Lab, the company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Its first AI model was trained on Nvidia hardware, the report said.
Sutskever’s shift in research direction
Sutskever is one of the key researchers in modern artificial intelligence. He helped found OpenAI and contributed to the development of large-model technologies including ChatGPT. After leaving OpenAI, however, he began questioning the path of driving AI progress purely by scaling data and compute, and turned to exploring a new direction for superintelligence research.