SSI and Nvidia announce long-term strategic partnership

Nvidia and Safe Superintelligence announced a long-term strategic partnership under which Nvidia invests in the company co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and gives it access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin computing platform. Nvidia’s own release did not state a dollar figure; Bloomberg and other outlets reported the investment at roughly $5bn, part of what SSI said would increase its available compute by an order of magnitude over the following year. Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang said the company was “excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover” powered by Vera Rubin; Sutskever said SSI had “research that is worthy of scaling up.”

The deal marked a shift in SSI’s compute strategy: the company, founded in June 2024 alongside Daniel Levy and Sequoia-backed since with roughly $9.1bn raised to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and Greenoaks, had previously trained on Google TPUs. It has released no public product in the two years since founding, positioning itself instead as pursuing a single research bet — reaching safe superintelligence directly, without intermediate commercial releases — that this deal gave it substantially more computing power to pursue. Some reporting at the time suggested a first model launch was being targeted for shortly afterward.

For Nvidia, the investment extended a pattern through 2026 of taking equity stakes in AI labs that were also large customers for its chips, tying its own revenue growth to the continued expansion of frontier AI training regardless of which lab’s approach ultimately succeeded.