Most startups need a product, paying customers and a believable path to profitability before investors start throwing billions of dollars their way.
Safe Superintelligence (SSI) appears to need none of the above.
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Nvidia is reportedly investing about $5 billion in SSI, the highly secretive AI company founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to Bloomberg. Alongside the investment, SSI will gain access to Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, which the companies say will increase its computing capacity tenfold.
“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 a press release issued by Nvidia and SSI. “We’re incredibly proud to be partnering with Jensen and the NVIDIA team, and we are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.”
Founded in 2024, SSI is taking what it calls a “straight shot” at building safe and aligned artificial superintelligence. That means focusing on research rather than releasing commercial products or chasing short-term revenue.
Pressure is on
Nvidia’s investment in SSI is the latest sign of just how much money is pouring into artificial intelligence. Global private investment in AI reached $344.7 billion in 2025, up 127.5% from the year before, according to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index.
Within months of launching, the startup raised $1 billion at a valuation of roughly $5 billion. Seven months later, another $2 billion funding round pushed that figure to $32 billion — a 540% jump before the company had released a product or published any research.
Behind that valuation is a small team. Sutskever launched SSI with Daniel Gross, a former Apple AI executive, and Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher. Gross initially oversaw fundraising and computing needs, while Sutskever and Levy led the research. Gross has since left the company.
That leaves SSI under pressure to prove it’s worth the price tag. The exact terms of Nvidia’s investment have not been disclosed, although the Financial Times reported that commitments of this size are often tied to a startup reaching certain milestones.
Moneywise reached out to SSI and Nvidia for comment but did not receive a response before publication.
SSI has also kept its research closely guarded, leaving investors to place extraordinary faith in its founders and their promise of a major breakthrough.
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Betting on Sutskever
The problem SSI says it’s trying to solve is becoming harder to ignore. During a recent cybersecurity test, OpenAI models found a way outside a restricted testing system and accessed Hugging Face, a popular platform where developers share AI models, data and research tools. The models were searching for information that could help them perform better on the test.
That kind of unexpected behaviour highlights why researchers are concerned about keeping increasingly powerful AI systems aligned with human instructions. It’s also why investors may be willing to place such a large bet on Sutskever.
Before co-founding OpenAI, he worked with Geoffrey Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky on AlexNet, a landmark neural network that showed how graphics chips could be used to train more powerful AI systems. He also spent nearly a decade at OpenAI, where he served as chief scientist and helped develop the technology that pushed generative AI into the mainstream.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Sutskever has already contributed to some of modern AI’s most important advances.
“We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform,” Huang said in a press release.
Nvidia has made similar investments and computing deals with OpenAI and Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI executive Mira Murati. The arrangement is part of a growing pattern of circular financing in the AI industry, with chipmakers investing in developers that may then use the funding to purchase their hardware.
For Nvidia, backing SSI is a bet that Sutskever can deliver another major breakthrough and that getting there will require far more computing power.
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This article originally appeared on Moneywise.com under the title: This AI startup has roughly 50 employees, no product and has never published a word of research. It’s worth $32 billion
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