Nvidia has announced a long-term partnership with OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (SSI), reportedly including an investment totalling $5 billion.
Nivida disclosed the deal on Monday without providing financial details, but numerous outlets including the Financial Times, Bloomberg, and Reuters have reported that the investment totals around $5 billion based on information from sources briefed on its terms.
Beyond what Nvidia described as “substantial investment”, SSI will gain access to the hardware company’s flagship Vera Rubin system. Nvidia said that this will enable SSI to increase its compute by “an order of magnitude”, accelerating its growth. SSI said in a post on social media site X that the investment would allow it to increase its compute power tenfold over the next 12 month.
The exact use of the platform remains unclear, however. SSI employs only a few dozen people and has remained highly secretive about its research since it was founded in 2024.
On its website, the Israeli-American company states that its goal is to build a safe superintelligence and it will not create commercial models until that time.
Superintelligence is a theory that one day AI will be vastly more intelligent than humanity. This hypothetical world could result in an AI that does not act in humanity’s best interests and instead pursues its own desires, leading to catastrophic results.
“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so,” said Ilya Sutskever, cofounder and chief executive of SSI. “We’re incredibly proud to be partnering with Jensen and the Nvidia team, and we are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.”
Nivida said in its announcement that it had obtained “rare access” to the research the company is carrying out, but did not provide further details.
“Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia. “We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform.”
This is Nvidia’s latest major investment in AI companies that use its products. As the primary developer of the chips that power AI training and inference, the company has been criticised for creating webs of interdependency between itself, its backers, and the companies it funds.
The decision has proven profitable, however, with chief executive Jensen Huang predicting $1 trillion in revenue from AI chip sales over the next two years.
