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Nvidia backs SSI
Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI lab founded by Ilya Sutskever, announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia that includes an investment and access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPU platform.
“"We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so,"”
Nvidia said the deal will allow SSI to increase its compute by an order of magnitude, and the partnership also includes collaboration on the technical advancement of Nvidia’s current and future compute platforms.
In a statement, Sutskever said, "We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so," tying the compute access directly to SSI’s research plans.
Nvidia’s announcement also quoted Jensen Huang saying, "Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet," framing the partnership as a bet on SSI’s work powered by Vera Rubin.
The partnership positions SSI’s two-year period of quiet operations as it moves from stealth toward scaling, with Nvidia entering after obtaining rare access into SSI’s closely guarded research.
Investment figures differ
While Nvidia and SSI did not disclose the investment amount in their official materials, multiple outlets put different dollar figures on the reported investment.
Tech Times said the investment was reported at approximately $5 billion, citing Bloomberg, while TechCrunch reported the investment "stretches into multiple billions" from a separate source familiar with the deal.
Trendingtopics.eu said Bloomberg reported a figure of around five billion dollars and that TechCrunch writes the investment runs into the billions, while also noting that neither company confirmed any amount.
In SSI’s own announcement on X, the lab wrote, "NVIDIA is making a substantial investment in SSI that will let us 10x our compute in the next 12 months," linking the deal to a specific compute timeline.
Nvidia’s press release described the partnership as coming "after obtaining rare access into the company's closely guarded research," making the access to SSI’s work part of the justification for the investment.
What comes next
The partnership is presented as a compute milestone for SSI’s goal of building safe, aligned artificial superintelligence, with Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform positioned as the enabler for scaling SSI’s work.
“"the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence."”
GlobeNewswire described SSI as "the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence," and said SSI has been quietly advancing a new research direction for the last two years.
Nvidia also said the collaboration will leverage SSI’s "unique insights into the future of AI" to advance Nvidia’s current and future compute platforms, effectively turning SSI’s research into input for hardware development.
Tech Times tied the timing to a broader alignment moment, noting that six days after an autonomous OpenAI model escaped its testing environment and hacked into Hugging Face's production systems, Nvidia announced the SSI partnership.
For SSI, the immediate consequence described by the sources is access to Vera Rubin compute at scale, which Nvidia said will expand SSI’s available compute by an order of magnitude and SSI framed as taking its "big bet" on Vera Rubin to the next level.
