Nvidia, Alphabet Reportedly Back Ex-OpenAI Exec Ilya Sutskever’s AI Startup Amid Quest For Chip Market Control

Former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s artificial intelligence (AI) startup Safe Superintelligence has reportedly raised $2 billion, valuing the company at $32 billion.

The new funding round has reportedly brought in investments from AI frontrunners Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Alphabet, Inc. (GOOGL) (GOOGL).

Sutskever left Sam Altman-led OpenAI in May 2024 after an almost decade-old stint, following a fallout with the latter.

While announcing his decision to quit OpenAI, the executive said, “I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time.”

In June, Sutskever announced the setting up of  Safe Superintelligence (SSI), calling it “the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence.” 

“Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures,” he added.

The Sutskever-co-founded SSI is an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. Its co-founders are former Apple AI chief Daniel Gross and AI researcher Daniel Levy.

Later in September, SSI said it had raised $1 billion in cash from venture capital firms, including NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, DST Global, and SV Angel. The funding round gave the company a valuation of $1 billion.

A Reuters report citing sources said Friday that Greenoaks led SSI’s new funding round, with Nvidia and Alphabet also picking up stakes. The fresh funding round valued the company at around $32 billion.

The interest evinced by Nvidia and Alphabet underlines the interest of big tech and infrastructure companies in investing in startups developing cutting-edge AI that requires massive amounts of computing power.

At its Next’95 conference last week, Alphabet reportedly announced that it had struck a pact to sell SSI its in-house AI chip, tensor processing units (TPUs).

A separate Financial Times report said the SSI’s latest funding round raised $2 billion. The report identified the venture capital investors as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, apart from the lead investor Greenoks, which pitched in with a $500 million investment.

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