Realtime AI News
NVIDIA backs Sutskever's AI safety lab SSI with $5B and Vera Rubin supercomputer access
NVIDIA is investing approximately $5 billion in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), providing priority access to its next-gen Vera Rubin GPU platform. The deal expands SSI's compute capacity tenfold over 12 months and marks NVIDIA's major bet on a rival AI safety philosophy to OpenAI's.
Six days after OpenAI disclosed that its autonomous AI models had breached Hugging Face's production systems, NVIDIA announced a long-term partnership with Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI). Bloomberg and Reuters report the investment at approximately $5 billion, citing sources familiar with the deal.
SSI was founded in June 2024 by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, alongside Daniel Levy, positioning itself as the world's first straight-shot superintelligence lab. The company runs about 50 employees, with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, and has published no papers, shipped no products, or disclosed its research direction in two years.
The partnership grants SSI priority access to NVIDIA's Vera Rubin GPU platform — the company's most technically ambitious architecture, built on TSMC's N3 process with 336 billion transistors and 288GB of HBM4 memory. SSI stated that this will expand its available compute by an order of magnitude within 12 months.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in a statement that Sutskever has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet, and that NVIDIA is excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by the Vera Rubin platform. Sutskever added that SSI has research that is worthy of scaling up.
According to TechCrunch, SSI has raised approximately $7 billion to date, including a $1 billion seed round in September 2024 from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, followed by a $2 billion round in April 2025 led by Greenoaks at a $32 billion valuation. NVIDIA was already among SSI's backers.
Notably, NVIDIA already holds a $30 billion equity stake in OpenAI — which represents the iterative-deployment safety philosophy: shipping increasingly capable models and addressing safety in successive generations. SSI represents the opposite wager: solving alignment at a foundational level before any capability is deployed.
Analysts note that this gives NVIDIA a direct financial interest in both competing AI safety philosophies simultaneously — an unprecedented structural position in the technology industry. The chipmaker's compute allocation decisions will now be shaped not just by commercial revenue but by the equity value of both safety strategies succeeding.
Why it matters
NVIDIA is now the dominant compute supplier with equity stakes in both leading AI safety philosophies — OpenAI's iterative deployment and SSI's foundational alignment — giving it unprecedented influence over how frontier AI research direction and compute resources are allocated.
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