Nvidia Invests $5 Billion in Former OpenAI Chief Ilya Sutskever’s AI Startup Safe Superintelligence

Nvidia is set to invest $5 billion in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup founded by Israeli-born Dr. Ilya Sutskever, according to Bloomberg. The investment accompanies a strategic partnership granting SSI access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform, a powerful computing system designed for training and running large AI models in data centers.

Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI, left the company in May 2025 following a failed attempt to remove CEO Sam Altman. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel laureate and AI pioneer. Sutskever launched SSI in June 2024 with a focus on developing advanced, safe AI through long-term research, operating under significant secrecy.

In March 2025, SSI raised $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and DST Global. The company declined a $32 billion acquisition offer from Meta in April 2025. The terms and valuation of Nvidia’s $5 billion investment have not been disclosed.

The partnership will enable SSI to significantly expand its computing power and collaborate with Nvidia on developing current and future computing platforms, leveraging SSI’s unique insights. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang praised Sutskever’s contributions to modern AI breakthroughs and expressed excitement about future innovations enabled by Vera Rubin. Sutskever emphasized the importance of Nvidia’s computing resources for advancing SSI’s research and expressed confidence in the partnership’s potential to elevate their work.