Nvidia Invests About $5 Billion in Safe Superintelligence; SSI to Prioritize Next-Gen Vera Rubin Platform

Nvidia and Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) announced a long-term strategic partnership on July 27, 2026. Under the agreement, Nvidia made a substantial investment in SSI, approximately $5 billion (about RMB 338 billion), comprising cash and equivalent computing power. SSI will receive priority access to Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin computing platform, and its available computing power will increase tenfold over the next 12 months. The two companies will also collaborate on advancing the technical development of Nvidia's current and future computing platforms. Nvidia said it finalized the partnership after deep engagement with SSI's highly confidential research and development system.

SSI was founded in 2024 by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, along with Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross. Gross left in June 2025. The company is headquartered in California and Tel Aviv, Israel, with a team of only 33 people. It has not yet released any products or published any research results. The company's website states its sole objective is to 'build safe superintelligence' — an AI system that comprehensively surpasses human capabilities without posing a threat to humanity. It rejects commercial distractions and does not plan to sell APIs or enterprise products.

Ilya Sutskever is a landmark researcher in AI. In 2012, he co-authored the AlexNet paper with his mentor Geoffrey Hinton, which launched the modern deep learning revolution in AI. In 2015, he co-founded OpenAI, where his technical thinking directly contributed to the creation of ChatGPT. He long championed the 'scaling law' — the idea that increasing data volume and computing power could improve model intelligence. In 2023, he was deeply involved in the OpenAI board's decision to remove CEO Sam Altman; after Altman was reinstated, Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024 and founded SSI the following month. Since then, he has publicly stated that the AI industry's reliance on pure scaling is yielding diminishing returns, saying the industry is 'in some sense back to an era of research' and that he and his team have found 'a new mountain to climb.'

SSI has continued to attract capital since its founding. In September 2024, the company completed a $1 billion initial funding round, valuing it at $5 billion, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. In March 2025, it completed a roughly $2 billion funding round, raising its valuation to $32 billion, with new investors including Greenoaks and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Prior to Nvidia's investment, SSI had raised approximately $7 billion in total. Previously, SSI relied primarily on Google's TPU chips for model training; this partnership marks a full shift to Nvidia's hardware ecosystem.

Nvidia's investment is the latest in a series of deals between AI chip makers and leading model developers. In March 2026, Nvidia invested in Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, which released its first AI model trained on Nvidia hardware in July 2026. In July 2026, Nvidia's competitor AMD also announced an investment of up to $5 billion in AI company Anthropic. Additionally, Nvidia is reportedly in talks to provide up to $250 billion in guarantees for a US data center project leased by OpenAI. Nvidia's market value is about $4.75 trillion. Its stock price fell nearly 5% on the day of the investment announcement, while its five-year credit default swap costs posted their largest single-day increase since the contract began trading.