Nvidia is set to invest $5 billion in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an artificial intelligence startup founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.
Nvidia and SSI announced a long-term partnership on July 27. While the specific investment amount was not disclosed, sources cited by the Financial Times and Reuters indicated that Nvidia's stake in SSI would be worth $5 billion.
As part of the agreement, SSI will implement Nvidia's next-generation AI computing system, 'Vera Rubin.' According to the Financial Times, SSI plans to increase its computing capabilities for AI research tenfold over the next year using this system.
The two companies will also collaborate on the development of Nvidia's current and future computing systems, utilizing the technical insights gained from SSI's AI research to inform Nvidia's upcoming system designs.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang expressed optimism, stating, "I expect SSI to achieve new technological breakthroughs based on Vera Rubin."
SSI, co-founded by Sutskever after he left OpenAI in 2024, aims to develop AI with intelligence surpassing that of humans in a safe manner. The name 'Safe Superintelligence' reflects this goal.
Although SSI has not yet released any products or specific research results and has a small team of several dozen employees, it secured an additional $2 billion in funding last year, bringing its valuation to $32 billion. Major investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and Greenoaks.
Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist at OpenAI, led research on the GPT series of AI models. In 2012, he co-developed the image recognition AI model 'AlexNet' with Professor Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky.
The Wall Street Journal noted that this partnership could help Nvidia secure prominent AI research firms as clients and counter competitors in AI semiconductors, such as Google. SSI has primarily used Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for its AI projects.
In March, Nvidia also invested in Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. The two companies have established a long-term partnership to supply and build a Vera Rubin system with a capacity of at least 1 gigawatt.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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