Nvidia said on July 27 that it has formed a long-term strategic partnership with Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI company co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and made what it described as a substantial investment in the startup. SSI has not released any products so far.
Deal size was not disclosed by Nvidia
Nvidia did not give a specific figure in its announcement and referred to the transaction only as a “substantial investment.”
Bloomberg reported the deal was worth about $5 billion. A person cited by TechCrunch said Nvidia’s investment amounted to billions of dollars.
PitchBook data cited by TechCrunch showed SSI has raised about $7 billion to date and carries a post-money valuation of $32 billion. Existing backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed, GV and Sequoia, with Nvidia now joining that group.
Compute access is central to the partnership
For SSI, the deal is not only about capital. The bigger piece is access to computing infrastructure.
Nvidia said the partnership will give SSI access to its next-generation Vera Rubin computing platform. According to the company, that would lift SSI’s compute resources by roughly an order of magnitude, or close to 10x.
Sutskever said in a statement: “We have research that is worth scaling, and having access to a large Nvidia computer will help us move forward.”
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said: “Starting with AlexNet, Ilya has driven several breakthroughs that helped build the foundation of modern AI. We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover on the Vera Rubin platform.”
SSI was founded in 2024 and remains highly secretive
SSI was founded in 2024 by Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy. Its sole stated goal is to build safe superintelligence. Over the past two years, the company has not launched a product, and its research direction has remained tightly guarded.
The contrast is notable. Sutskever has previously said in public that simply scaling models through more compute is approaching its limits, and that the AI industry needs to return to research itself. Now, the company built around that line of thinking has secured close to a 10x increase in compute resources through this deal.
Sutskever’s explanation was that the company’s research is now worth scaling.
SSI had already partnered with Google Cloud
Before this agreement with Nvidia, SSI had already entered a partnership with Google Cloud in 2025. Nvidia now becomes another compute partner for the company.