Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI research lab founded by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, has entered a long-term strategic partnership with Nvidia that includes a substantial investment and access to the chipmaker’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPU platform. Bloomberg reported the investment at $5 billion, though neither company officially confirmed the figure, describing it only as “substantial.”
The partnership is expected to increase SSI’s compute resources by an order of magnitude, enabling the lab to scale its research into safe artificial superintelligence after two years of operating in stealth. SSI had previously raised $2 billion in April 2025 at a $32 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, and Sequoia Capital.
“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so,” Sutskever said in a statement. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised Sutskever’s foundational contributions, noting his work on AlexNet, which proved the power of GPU scaling for deep learning. Huang added, “We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform.”
Nvidia gained rare access to SSI’s closely guarded research before signing the deal, suggesting the partnership goes beyond a typical hardware sale. Beyond providing compute, the two companies will collaborate on advancing Nvidia’s current and future platforms, with SSI’s insights feeding directly into Nvidia’s roadmap. SSI’s “straight shot” research approach avoids commercial products, focusing solely on foundational alignment techniques—a contrast to labs facing pressure to release models quickly amid growing AI alignment concerns.
