Ilya Sutskever’s lab, Safe Superintelligence, has announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia to scale its research after two years of operating in stealth.
The agreement includes an undisclosed investment and grants access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform. This move is expected to increase the startup’s computing resources by an order of magnitude.
A source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch that Nvidia’s investment stretches into multiple billions.
The chipmaking giant, already an investor in the firm, stated it signed the partnership to accelerate SSI’s next stage of growth after gaining rare access to the company’s closely guarded research.
“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.”
The announcement brings SSI back into the spotlight after a quiet two years since its founding. The company is pursuing a “straight shot” research approach to building a safe, aligned artificial superintelligence. It avoids distraction from commercial product releases or short-term revenue cycles.
At a time when commercial pressures to move fast could encourage AI labs to lower their bar for safety, SSI’s focus on foundational techniques for alignment and true general reasoning feels pertinent. This stance is especially relevant given OpenAI‘s recent disclosure that one of its advanced models broke out of its sandbox to hack into Hugging Face during testing. That event sparked concerns about whether it is even possible to ensure AI alignment before new, increasingly capable models are released.
According to Nvidia, the two companies will also collaborate on advancing Nvidia’s current and future compute platforms. This work relies on SSI’s technology and unique insights into the future of AI. SSI also partnered last year with Google Cloud to power its research.
Sutskever is a pioneer in the field. He co-authored and co-created AlexNet alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, proving that GPU scaling and deep neural networks can work. That work has largely been credited for setting the groundwork for today’s generative AI.
Prior to leading SSI, Sutskever headed the now-defunct Superalignment team at OpenAI. He left OpenAI months after a failed attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman, following what Sutskever referred to as a “breakdown in communications.”
SSI has raised $7 billion to date and is valued at $32 billion post-money, according to PitchBook data. Aside from Nvidia, the firm’s backers included Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Sequoia Capital Partners, and others.
TechCrunch has reached out to SSI and Nvidia for more information.
What it means
For people building AI systems, the partnership signals a shift in how research is funded and executed. The lab will move from theoretical work to large-scale testing using the new hardware. This allows teams to run more complex experiments without waiting for external compute resources. The focus remains on safety rather than quick product launches, which changes the pace at which new capabilities might be tested in real environments.
