Nvidia will make a $5 billion equity investment in Safe Superintelligence, the secretive AI research lab founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, as part of a long-term strategic partnership between the two companies, a person briefed on the deal said Monday.
The companies announced the partnership Monday without disclosing financial terms, though the $5 billion figure was first reported by Bloomberg and has since been confirmed by multiple sources familiar with the matter. Neither Nvidia nor SSI would comment officially on the size of the investment.
Under the deal, Safe Superintelligence will get priority access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin GPU platform, which the companies said would expand SSI’s computing capacity roughly tenfold over the next 12 months. In a post on X, SSI said it had reached a point where its research was ready to scale, and that the Nvidia partnership would let it pursue that scale-up.
The investment extends an existing relationship rather than marking Nvidia’s first bet on the company: Nvidia had already participated in earlier SSI funding rounds. SSI’s total funding now stands at roughly $7 billion, with the company valued at about $32 billion, according to people familiar with its finances — a striking figure for a firm that has yet to release a public product, publish research, or generate revenue.
Sutskever founded Safe Superintelligence in June 2024, shortly after departing OpenAI, where he had been a co-founder and led the company’s alignment research before a brief and highly public falling-out with then-CEO Sam Altman. He took over as SSI’s chief executive in July 2025. The company has operated largely in stealth since its founding, splitting a deliberately small team between offices in Palo Alto, California, and Tel Aviv, Israel.
SSI’s backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Alphabet, whose Google Cloud unit has also supplied computing power to the startup since a partnership struck in April 2025.
The size of Nvidia’s commitment underscores how the chipmaker has increasingly moved beyond selling processors to taking direct equity stakes in AI labs it views as central to the technology’s future, a strategy it has also pursued with OpenAI and other frontier AI companies. For SSI, the deal offers a rare public data point on a company whose entire premise — pursuing what Sutskever has called a “straight shot” to safe superintelligence — has kept it removed from the product cycles and public benchmarks that define most of its AI industry peers.
