Nvidia has formed a long-term partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) start-up Safe Superintelligence (SSI) and invested in the company founded by former OpenAI executives, including chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.
The chipmaker did not disclose the size of the investment. However, Bloomberg reported the deal was worth $5bn. Verdict has contacted Nvidia and SSI for comment.
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In a statement, Nvidia said its “substantial investment” and SSI’s access to the next-generation Nvidia Vera Rubin platform would enable the start-up “to increase its compute by an order of magnitude”.
As part of the agreement, Nvidia and SSI will collaborate on the technical development of current and future Nvidia compute platforms, drawing on SSI’s perspective on the future direction of AI.
Nvidia said it decided to pursue the partnership after receiving unusual access to SSI’s “closely guarded” research.
The deal is aimed at supporting SSI’s next stage of growth.
SSI has spent the last two years developing a new research line designed to create what it describes as “a powerful and robustly aligned artificial intelligence”.
The company was co-founded in June 2024 by Sutskeverfollowing his departure from Open AI in May that year.
His co-founders include Daniel Gross, a venture capitalist who previously led AI initiatives at Apple, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher.
Nvidia said Sutskever played a central role in shaping modern AI through work on AlexNet, AlphaGo, sequence-to-sequence learning and GPT models.
The company added that he also led research behind reasoning models such as OpenAI o1.
Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said: “Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet. We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform.”
Sutskever added: “We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so.”
Other investors in the start-up include Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital.
Last week, South Korea-based SK Group and Nvidia announced a partnership worth over $500bn, aiming to establish AI infrastructure to meet rising global compute demands.
