Ilya Sutskever's AI lab Safe Superintelligence (SSI) has emerged from two years of stealth to announce a long-term partnership with Nvidia, aimed at dramatically expanding its computing power. The deal gives SSI access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin GPU platform, expected to boost the startup's compute resources "by an order of magnitude", and comes as SSI, an AI safety-focused lab pursuing a slow, research-first approach, seeks to scale up after what Nvidia described as promising research milestones.

The agreement includes an undisclosed investment from Nvidia, already a backer of SSI, reportedly worth several billion dollars according to a source familiar with the deal. SSI, founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Sutskever after his departure following the failed attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman, has raised $7 billion to date and is valued at $32 billion, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Sequoia Capital and Google Cloud, which it also partnered with last year. The companies said they would collaborate further on developing Nvidia's future computing platforms using SSI's research insights.