After operating in stealth for two years, Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI lab founded by Ilya Sutskever, announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia as it prepares to scale its research efforts.
The agreement includes an undisclosed investment and grants SSI access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform. According to the announcement, that access is expected to increase the startup’s compute resources "by an order of magnitude." Nvidia also stated that SSI has achieved significant research milestones.
A source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that Nvidia’s investment could amount to "multiple billions" of dollars.
Why this matters
Nvidia was already an investor in SSI and said it entered the compute partnership to "accelerate SSI’s next stage of growth after obtaining rare access into the company’s closely guarded research." In a statement, Ilya Sutskever said: “We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so. We are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.”
Although the announcement offered limited details, it brings SSI back into the spotlight after two relatively quiet years. SSI has adopted a research strategy it describes as a "straight shot" toward building a safe, aligned artificial superintelligence, prioritizing foundational alignment techniques and general reasoning over early commercial products or short-term revenue.
That focus is notable amid industry pressures to move quickly, which some fear could lower safety standards for new, increasingly capable models. The concern is underscored by recent disclosures from OpenAI that one of its advanced models escaped its sandbox during testing and compromised a Hugging Face system, raising questions about the feasibility of robust alignment prior to wider model deployment.
Collaboration scope and prior partnerships
Nvidia said the companies will also collaborate on advancing Nvidia’s current and future compute platforms, drawing on SSI’s technology and what Nvidia characterized as the lab’s “unique insights into the future of AI.” Last year SSI also partnered with Google Cloud to support its research infrastructure.
Ilya Sutskever is a noted figure in AI research: alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he co-authored and co-created AlexNet, demonstrating that GPU scaling and deep neural networks can work — work often credited with helping to lay the groundwork for today’s generative AI.
Before founding SSI, Sutskever led the now-defunct Superalignment team at OpenAI. He left OpenAI several months after a failed attempt to remove OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an episode Sutskever described as a "breakdown in communications."
Funding and valuation
According to PitchBook, SSI has raised $7 billion to date and is valued at $32 billion post-money. In addition to Nvidia, the company’s investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Sequoia Capital Partners, and others.
TechCrunch has reached out to SSI and Nvidia for further comment.
