Former OpenAI chief scientist receives heavy investment from Nvidia, ushering in a leap in computational power for safe superintelligence

Former OpenAI chief scientist receives heavy investment from Nvidia, ushering in a leap in computational power for safe superintelligence

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Nvidia is betting on one of the most mysterious startups in the AI field, further consolidating its core position in the global AI computing power landscape.

Nvidia announced a "major" investment in the artificial intelligence laboratory Safe Superintelligence (SSI), founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and the two parties have simultaneously reached a long-term cooperation agreement.

According to the agreement, SSI will gain access to significant amounts of Nvidia's flagship GPU resources, and its computational capacity is expected to increase "by an order of magnitude." Previously, the company mainly relied on Alphabet's Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips under Google.

This investment not only injects critical computing power support into SSI, but also marks another strategic victory for Nvidia in competing for top customers during the AI boom. For the market, this collaboration means SSI's research progress might accelerate significantly, while Nvidia further extends its reach to cutting-edge and most-watched AI research institutions.

After obtaining rare internal disclosures on SSI's research progress, Nvidia decided to make this "major" investment, but the specific amount was not disclosed.

This is not Nvidia's first time adopting such a strategy. In March this year, Nvidia entered into a similar investment agreement with another former OpenAI executive, former CTO Mira Murati. Murati co-founded Thinking Machines Lab last year, and earlier this month, the lab released its first AI model trained on Nvidia hardware.

Both transactions follow the same logic: Nvidia strategically invests to bind star entrepreneurs, ensuring high-profile clients preferentially choose its chips in the AI arms race, while also putting pressure on competitors.

SSI: The mysterious lab valued at $30 billion

SSI was co-founded by Sutskever in 2024, with a highly focused positioning—the company publicly states it has only one goal: to "run straight" towards researching "safe superintelligence," AI systems that can accomplish all human tasks without posing a threat to humanity.

Thanks to Sutskever's reputation in the industry, SSI quickly raised about $2 billion from top venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, and achieved an estimated $30 billion valuation last year. Nevertheless, the company remains highly secretive, with research results almost never publicly disclosed.

Sutskever stated that the company's research is "focused on overlooked aspects of human brain function." The collaboration with Nvidia is one of SSI's most substantial public moves to date.

Sutskever: From AI revolution pioneer to independent explorer

Sutskever was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Israel; he is a mathematical prodigy. During his graduate studies in Canada, he studied under Nobel laureate and AI research pioneer Geoffrey Hinton, and in 2012 co-authored a milestone paper in computer vision with Hinton. This paper demonstrated that scaling up deep neural networks with large amounts of data and computing power could yield quantifiable improvements in intelligence, thus igniting the fuse for modern AI competition.

Later, Sutskever joined Google and became a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015. During his time at OpenAI, his research insights directly promoted the birth of ChatGPT, and he gained fame for his belief that "expanding the scale of training data and computational power will lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI)."

However, his relationship with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ended dramatically—he once voted to remove Altman, and left the company months after Altman was reinstated. After leaving OpenAI, Sutskever has publicly begun to question whether simply scaling the existing paradigm is enough to achieve genuine breakthroughs.

The chip giant logic behind the contest for computing power

The deeper context of this cooperation is the increasingly fierce competition in the AI chip market. SSI previously primarily used Google's TPU, but now turning to Nvidia's GPU is a milestone for Nvidia—not just an investment return, but also winning an extremely influential client in the computing power race against Google and other competitors.

For SSI, an "order of magnitude" increase in computing resources means a qualitative leap in its research capabilities, which may accelerate its pursuit of safe superintelligence. In today's AI competition, the ability to obtain computing power often directly determines the speed and depth of research progress.

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