Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence gets access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin platform
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley ● Covered by 3 sources
Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence just landed a multi-billion-dollar deal for Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips. It's a huge compute boost for a startup that's stayed almost silent since launching in 2024.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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Safe Superintelligence Inc. has spent most of its life avoiding the spotlight. That changed this week with news that Nvidia is handing the startup access to its Vera Rubin GPU platform, a move SSI says will boost its available compute by an order of magnitude. Bloomberg reports the deal runs into the multiple billions of dollars and is meant to push SSI into what Sutskever called its next stage of growth.
The company itself has an unusual origin story. Founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, all OpenAI alumni, SSI set out to build superintelligence safely and ethically, deliberately steering clear of revenue pressure or shipping commercial products. That approach has meant almost total quiet from the company, broken only briefly last year when Gross left his CEO post to join Meta's new Superintelligence Labs.
Nvidia says its decision to invest came after gaining rare access to SSI's internal research, which it describes as showing real progress toward the company's stated goal. Sutskever backed that up in his own words, telling Bloomberg the research is worthy of scaling and that a big Nvidia machine is what will let that happen. It's a notable vote of confidence for a lab that, to date, has not released a single public model or paper.
Sutskever's reputation carries weight here. He co-created AlexNet with Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, work that proved deep neural networks could scale using large GPU clusters and effectively set the stage for the generative AI boom. He later co-founded OpenAI and ran its now-shuttered Superalignment team before departing amid the fallout from the attempted ouster of CEO Sam Altman, citing a breakdown in communication.
Despite having nothing shipped, SSI has pulled in more than $7 billion in funding and carries a $32 billion valuation, according to Pitchbook. Its backers include Nvidia, Alphabet, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital Partners and GV. Nvidia says the relationship goes beyond just supplying chips — it plans to work with SSI on future compute platforms, drawing on what it calls the startup's unique insights into where AI is headed.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
A company with no product, no public research and a $32 billion valuation getting an order-of-magnitude compute upgrade says everything about how AI investing works right now — pedigree and promises still buy hardware. Sutskever's bet that safety-first research deserves that kind of scale is admirable, but until something actually ships,
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