Nvidia has agreed a multibillion-dollar investment in Safe Superintelligence, the secretive start-up led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. The deal hands SSI Nvidia's Vera Rubin hardware and a 10-fold jump in computing power over the next 12 months. Neither company disclosed the financial terms.
Nvidia has agreed a multibillion-dollar investment in Safe Superintelligence, the secretive artificial intelligence start-up led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. The two companies announced the deal on Monday as a long-term partnership under which the start-up will use the chipmaker's latest Vera Rubin hardware.
SSI is raising multiple billions of dollars from Nvidia, according to people briefed on the deal, to build the computing capacity it needs to capitalise on what it says is a research breakthrough. Both companies declined to comment on the financial terms. The money will let SSI increase its available computing power 10-fold over the next 12 months, the company said.
Nvidia adds to a run of circular AI financing
The deal is the latest in a series of circular financing arrangements between AI chipmakers and model developers. Just last week, Nvidia rival AMD said it would invest up to $5bn in Anthropic.
Nvidia has struck similar large-scale investments before with some of its biggest customers, including OpenAI and Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. Such investments are typically contingent on technology or infrastructure milestones.
SSI has no product and a few dozen staff
Sutskever's start-up still employs only a few dozen people, and it is pursuing an approach to AI research that breaks with the one underpinning the large language models built by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. It was valued at $32bn last year when it raised $2bn from backers including Greenoaks, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Nvidia was already among its investors.
Yet little is known about what the company is working on. It has yet to release its first product or publish any research. Sutskever said in a statement on Monday: "We have research that is worthy of scaling up".
The researcher who now questions scaling
Sutskever helped create the technology behind the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, then co-founded SSI in 2024 after being closely involved in the boardroom coup against OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman the previous year. Altman was quickly reinstated, and Sutskever left the company six months later.
He was also one of the first AI engineers to grasp the scaling law, which showed that large language models became more capable with more data and computing power. But in November he suggested that the returns from that approach were diminishing.
Source: Financial Times
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