# Ilya Sutskever's SSI Partners with Nvidia, Gains Access to Vera Rubin Platform
Safe Superintelligence Inc., the AI lab founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has struck a long-term partnership with Nvidia that includes a multi-billion-dollar investment and access to the chipmaker's next-generation Vera Rubin compute platform.
The deal, announced July 27, will increase SSI's available compute by an order of magnitude. Nvidia said it decided to invest after gaining rare access to the company's closely guarded research, which it described as having reached "significant research milestones."
"Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. "We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform."
Sutskever, who left OpenAI in May 2024 and founded SSI the following month, said the company has "research that is worthy of scaling up." The partnership gives SSI priority access to Vera Rubin systems, Nvidia's successor to the Blackwell architecture, which began shipping to data center customers in late 2025.
SSI has operated with unusual secrecy since its founding. The company describes itself as "the world's first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence." It has no public products, no published research papers, and no public benchmarks. Co-founder Daniel Gross, who initially served as CEO, left the company in July 2025 to join Meta's Superintelligence Labs, leaving Sutskever as chief executive.
The company has raised more than $7 billion to date from investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and Greenoaks, and was valued at $32 billion prior to the Nvidia deal. Nvidia's additional investment will push that figure higher, though exact terms were not disclosed. The two companies will also collaborate on advancing Nvidia's current and future compute platforms using SSI's research insights.
The partnership places SSI among an elite group of AI labs with guaranteed access to cutting-edge Nvidia hardware at a time when demand for AI compute continues to outstrip supply. Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI have all signed similarly structured deals with cloud providers and chipmakers in the past year.
Sources: - https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-inc-and-nvidia-announce-long-term-strategic-partnership - https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/27/ilya-sutskevers-safe-superintelligence-gets-access-nvidias-vera-rubin-platform
