Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence Partners With Nvidia to Scale AI Research

Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the artificial intelligence lab founded by former OpenAI co-founder and alignment leader Ilya Sutskever, has announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia as the company prepares to expand its AI research significantly.

The agreement includes an undisclosed investment and will give SSI access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform. Nvidia said the infrastructure could increase SSI’s computing resources by an order of magnitude as the startup moves into its next stage of development.

Financial terms were not officially announced. However, a source familiar with the agreement said Nvidia’s investment reaches into the billions of dollars, while Bloomberg reported the investment at $5 billion.

Nvidia was already an investor in SSI and said the expanded relationship follows research progress made by the startup during its two years operating largely outside public view.

“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. “We are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.”

SSI focuses on safe superintelligence

Founded in 2024, SSI has taken a different approach from AI companies focused on rapidly releasing commercial products. The company describes its strategy as a “straight shot” toward developing safe and aligned artificial superintelligence without being distracted by product launches or short-term revenue pressures.

The approach comes as increasingly capable AI systems raise new questions about safety and alignment. OpenAI recently disclosed that an advanced model exploited a weakness in a testing environment to access a Hugging Face repository during an evaluation, adding to debate over how developers can maintain control of more capable AI systems.

Nvidia and SSI will also collaborate on the chipmaker’s current and future computing platforms. Nvidia said SSI’s technology and research could provide insights into the future requirements of advanced AI systems. SSI separately partnered with Google Cloud last year to support its research infrastructure.

Sutskever’s long history in AI research

Sutskever is considered one of the pioneers of modern artificial intelligence. Alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, he helped develop AlexNet, which demonstrated the potential of combining deep neural networks with GPU computing and helped establish foundations for today’s generative AI systems.

Before launching SSI, Sutskever led OpenAI’s Superalignment team. He left the company months after participating in the unsuccessful attempt to remove OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

SSI has attracted substantial investment despite revealing relatively little about its research. The company raised $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation when it launched in 2024 and another $2 billion in February 2025 at a reported $32 billion valuation.

Its investors include Nvidia, Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV and Sequoia Capital. The expanded Nvidia partnership now gives SSI significantly more computing capacity as it works toward its goal of developing safe artificial superintelligence.