Nvidia has agreed to make a $5 billion equity investment in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the artificial intelligence start-up founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

The companies announced on Monday that Nvidia would become a strategic investor in SSI as part of a long-term partnership to expand the start-up’s computing capacity.

The deal will also give SSI access to Nvidia’s latest Vera Rubin AI computing platform, increasing its available computing resources for what it describes as “safe superintelligence.”

“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so,” Mr Sutskever said in a statement.

Mr Sutskever, former co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI, launched Safe Superintelligence in June 2024 with Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy shortly after leaving the company.

Since then, the start-up has maintained a low public profile, focusing exclusively on AI safety research rather than releasing commercial products.

Despite its secrecy, SSI has attracted significant investor interest.

Earlier this year, the company raised $2 billion at a reported valuation of $32 billion, despite not yet generating revenue from commercial AI products.

For Nvidia, the investment strengthens the rapid expansion of the AI industry by supporting the firm’s next-generation AI hardware, as demand for advanced chips used to run large AI models continues to grow.

The investment expands Nvidia’s access to advanced computing infrastructure to boost research on its mission of developing superintelligence as its sole objective.