Nvidia Makes ‘Substantial’ Investment in Sutskever’s Startup

Ilya Sutskever

Nvidia Corp. said it has made a “substantial” investment in Safe Superintelligence Inc., the artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

In addition to the investment, Safe Superintelligence, known as SSI, will receive access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, according to a joint statement on Monday. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Sutskever, a researcher who was instrumental in developing OpenAI’s technology, co-founded Safe Superintelligence with a focus on developing safe AI systems. The startup has said it doesn’t intend to sell AI products in the near future.

Safe Superintelligence has previously raised about $3 billion in funding from investors and was valued at $32 billion last year. Its investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and DST Global.

Nvidia has backed a number of prominent AI startups, which also rely on the chipmaker’s hardware to build and run their software. Some of those deals have been criticized for being circular in nature, creating an increasingly interconnected web of dependencies between technology suppliers and AI startups.

Nvidia is also in discussions to provide a guarantee of as much as $250 billion to help OpenAI lease computing from a US data center project, in what would be among the chipmaker’s biggest financing deals with a customer.

Nvidia shares fell as much as 2.3% to $202.13 on Monday.