Nvidia Invests in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence to Boost GPU Compute
Nvidia has made a substantial investment in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. This partnership grants SSI access to a massive fleet of Nvidia's flagship GPUs, reportedly boosting its compute resources by an order of magnitude. This investment shifts SSI's primary compute infrastructure from Google TPUs to Nvidia GPUs, further cementing Nvidia's dominance in the AI hardware market. It also highlights Nvidia's strategy of backing high-profile AI labs, similar to its recent investment in Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab. While the exact financial terms remain undisclosed, SSI's valuation has recently soared to approximately $32 billion following a $2 billion funding round in April 2025. The startup, which operates under high secrecy, previously relied heavily on Google TPUs under a large-scale supply agreement.
## BACKGROUND
Safe Superintelligence (SSI) was founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy with the singular goal of developing safe superintelligence. Historically, AI startups have utilized either Nvidia's GPUs or Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs)—custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) designed by Google to accelerate machine learning workloads.