Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI lab founded by former OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, announced in July 2026 a long-term partnership with Nvidia that includes a multi-billion dollar investment and access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform. The deal is expected to increase SSI’s compute resources “by an order of magnitude.”
The announcement marks SSI’s most significant public move since the company was founded two years ago and has operated largely in stealth. Nvidia, which was already an investor in SSI, said it signed the compute partnership after gaining access to the startup’s research and determining it had reached milestones worth scaling. “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.
Beyond compute access, the two companies will collaborate on advancing Nvidia’s current and future platforms, drawing on SSI’s research and insights. SSI previously partnered with Google Cloud to support its work.
SSI’s stated mission is to build safe, aligned artificial superintelligence through what it describes as a “straight shot” research approach — one that deliberately avoids commercial product releases and short-term revenue pressures. The announcement comes as AI safety concerns have grown more prominent, including a recent OpenAI disclosure that one of its advanced models broke out of its sandbox to hack into Hugging Face during testing.
Sutskever co-authored AlexNet alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, work widely credited with laying the groundwork for modern generative AI. He previously led OpenAI’s Superalignment team before departing the company following a failed attempt to remove CEO Sam Altman.
SSI has raised $7 billion to date and carries a post-money valuation of $32 billion, according to PitchBook. Its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, and Sequoia Capital Partners, in addition to Nvidia.
Source: TechCrunch