Nvidia bets $5bn on Ilya Sutskever’s AI breakthrough

Nvidia has agreed a $5bn investment in Safe Superintelligence, the secretive artificial intelligence start-up led by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, deepening the chipmaker’s ties with one of Silicon Valley’s most closely watched AI companies.

The Silicon Valley group and SSI announced the deal on Monday as part of a “long-term partnership” that will see the start-up use Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin hardware.

The $4.75tn chipmaker has agreed to invest around $5bn, according to people briefed on the terms of the deal. Such large commitments are typically contingent on the start-up hitting certain milestones.

The two companies declined to comment on the financial terms of the deal, saying only that the investment was “substantial”.

The funds will help SSI to build the computing capacity needed to capitalise on what it says is a research breakthrough.

“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so,” Sutskever said on Monday.

The investment will allow SSI to increase its available computing power 10-fold over the next 12 months, the company said.

The investment is the latest in a series of circular financing deals between AI chipmakers and model developers. Last week, Nvidia rival AMD said it would invest up to $5bn in Anthropic.

The start-up, which still has only a few dozen employees, has been working on a new approach to AI research that breaks with the approach underpinning large language models developed by OpenAI, Google and Anthropic.

SSI was previously valued at $32bn last year when it raised $2bn from investors including Greenoaks, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz. Nvidia is an existing investor in the company.

Despite its lofty valuation and high-profile talent, little is known about what it is working on. The start-up is yet to release its first product or publish any research. Sutskever told the FT in 2024 that he and his team had “identified a new mountain to climb that’s a…