NVIDIA and Safe Superintelligence Inc. announced a long-term strategic partnership on July 27, 2026, pairing a substantial NVIDIA equity investment reported at $5 billion with priority access to NVIDIA's next-generation Vera Rubin platform, which the two companies said would expand SSI's available compute by an order of magnitude.
An order-of-magnitude compute expansion
The deal gives Ilya Sutskever's stealth lab preferred access to Vera Rubin systems and locks in a multi-year collaboration on future NVIDIA compute platforms, with SSI feeding back research signals from its frontier training runs. NVIDIA said it made the investment after receiving rare access to SSI's closely guarded research direction. "We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so," Sutskever said in the joint press release.
NVIDIA's boldest AI-lab bet yet
SSI, founded in June 2024 by former OpenAI chief scientist Sutskever and Daniel Levy, was previously valued at around $32 billion after a 2025 round led by Greenoaks Capital, with Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and Sequoia Capital also on the cap table. Before the NVIDIA deal, the two-year-old lab had raised roughly $3 billion despite shipping no products, demos or public papers.
Sutskever aligns with Jensen Huang
"Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet," said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. The deal extends a run of NVIDIA anchor investments and priority-compute pacts across the frontier-model ecosystem, following its Vera Rubin ramp with hyperscalers, its SK Hynix HBM4 memory pact, and its Vera Rubin distribution through Microsoft and Mistral.
What it means for the compute-scarce frontier race
For a lab whose stated business model insulates safety and progress from short-term commercial pressure, the pact underscores that even a Sutskever-led team can't advance toward superintelligence without hyperscale, cutting-edge silicon. It also gives NVIDIA a front-row seat to another research trajectory beyond OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, deepening the company's role as both financier and hardware supplier to the AI frontier.
Reporting based on coverage from the NVIDIA Newsroom, Bloomberg, TechCrunch and Data Center Dynamics.