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NVIDIA bets on Ilya Sutskever's SSI lab in major compute deal

NVIDIA is doubling down on the AI talent pool. The chip giant has invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a highly secretive AI lab founded by Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI. The Wall Street Journal broke the news, calling the investment "substantial," though exact figures remain under wraps.

What's really at the heart of this deal? Computing power. Under the agreement, SSI gets access to a large number of NVIDIA's flagship GPUs, which will increase its computing capacity by an "order of magnitude." Previously, SSI relied mainly on Google's TPU chips. NVIDIA decided to invest after getting a peek at SSI's research progress, signaling confidence in Sutskever's technical vision.

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A Secret Giant Emerges

SSI was founded by Sutskever in 2024 with a laser-focused mission: achieve "safe superintelligence" in one go—an AI that can perform any task humans can do without posing a threat. The company's valuation has soared to around $30 billion (about 203.3 billion yuan), thanks to about $2 billion in funding from top venture firms like a16z and Sequoia Capital. Despite the hype, SSI's research details remain highly confidential.

NVIDIA's Strategic Play

This isn't NVIDIA's first bet on former OpenAI talent. In March, the company made a similar investment deal with Thinking Machines Lab, founded by ex-OpenAI CTO Miriam Prabhu. That lab's first AI model, released this month, was trained using NVIDIA hardware.

From Prabhu to Sutskever, NVIDIA is systematically locking in the top research minds in AI. The strategy is clear: build a deeply integrated computing ecosystem on top of GPU sales. If you want to train the next generation of models, you have to play in NVIDIA's orbit.

Key Points

  • NVIDIA has invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), Ilya Sutskever's AI lab.
  • The deal gives SSI access to NVIDIA's flagship GPUs, boosting compute power tenfold.
  • SSI's valuation is around $30 billion, with $2 billion in funding from top VCs.
  • This follows a similar NVIDIA investment in Thinking Machines Lab in March.
  • NVIDIA aims to bind top AI researchers to its GPU ecosystem.