9th August 2026 Secretive AI lab scales up its push for superintelligence Safe Superintelligence claims it has research worth scaling, as Nvidia commits billions of dollars and next-generation hardware to the secretive AI start-up.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), the artificial intelligence laboratory founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, has entered a major partnership with Nvidia that will increase its computing power tenfold. The chipmaker is investing $5 billion in SSI, according to reports, while providing access to its next-generation Vera Rubin computing platform. Rather than a single chip, Vera Rubin combines six co-designed chips that operate together as one AI supercomputer. Nvidia says the platform can train advanced mixture-of-experts models using one-quarter as many GPUs as its previous-generation Blackwell systems, while reducing inference token costs by up to tenfold. The two companies will also collaborate on future hardware designs, with Nvidia gaining insights from SSI's research into advanced AI. SSI differs markedly from other leading AI companies. Founded in June 2024 by Sutskever, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, it describes itself as the world's first "straight-shot" superintelligence lab. Rather than releasing public-facing chatbots, APIs or other intermediate products, its entire roadmap has one objective: developing an artificial intelligence that surpasses human capabilities while remaining safe and aligned with human interests. The company emerged shortly after Sutskever left OpenAI in May 2024. His departure followed the previous year's boardroom crisis, in which he had supported the removal of CEO Sam Altman before later expressing regret over his role in the decision. Sutskever and other researchers had reportedly become concerned that OpenAI's growing commercial ambitions were taking precedence over its original emphasis on AI safety.
Investors have since placed extraordinary bets on SSI. The company raised $1 billion only a few months after its creation, followed by another $2 billion in 2025, when its valuation reportedly reached $32 billion, despite having no publicly released product. Remarkably, SSI is believed to have only around 50 employees, compared with several thousand at OpenAI and Anthropic. Sutskever became CEO after Gross left the company. Perhaps most intriguingly, SSI now says it has spent two years quietly pursuing a new research direction aimed at producing "powerful and robustly aligned" AI. Nvidia gained rare access to this closely guarded work before agreeing to the partnership. "Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia. "We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform." "We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so," said Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and CEO of 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." Details remain scarce, with no architecture, benchmarks or public model yet revealed. But Nvidia's enormous investment suggests that one of AI's most secretive laboratories may be approaching a significant new phase in the race towards superintelligence.
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