Google parent Alphabet and chip giant Nvidia have invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever that quickly reached a $32 billion valuation in a round led by Greenoaks, Reuters reports.
The move shows renewed interest from tech heavyweights in funding startups developing advanced AI that requires enormous computing resources. Google Cloud also announced a deal to sell SSI access to its tensor processing units (TPUs), specialized AI chips previously kept mostly in-house.
“With these foundational model builders, the gravity is increasing dramatically over to us,” said Darren Mowry, managing director for Google’s startup partnerships, in an interview with Reuters this week.
SSI has become one of the highest-valued AI startups within months of launching, thanks largely to Sutskever’s reputation in AI development. The startup, co-founded with Daniel Gross (former head of AI at Apple) and Daniel Levy (AI researcher), operates from dual headquarters in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv.
Computing Power Play
While Nvidia dominates the AI chip market with over 80% share, SSI has primarily chosen Google’s TPUs for its AI research, according to two sources cited by Reuters. This represents a small but notable shift in the AI hardware landscape.
Google’s chips aim to excel at specific AI tasks and offer greater efficiency than general-purpose GPUs. Google offers both Nvidia GPUs and its own TPUs through its cloud service. Companies like Apple and Anthropic have used these chips to build large AI models.
Amazon presents another challenger with its own processors called Trainium and Inferentia. The retail giant announced in December that Anthropic would be the first customer to use a massive supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of its chips.
Similar Posts
Strategic Alliances Form
The investment follows an industry pattern where cloud providers back AI startups that both develop advanced models and consume large amounts of computing infrastructure:
- Amazon and Google have invested in Anthropic
- Microsoft has backed OpenAI
- Nvidia has also backed OpenAI, as well as Elon Musk’s xAI
SSI’s focus on “safe superintelligence” addresses concerns about advanced AI that surpasses human capabilities while remaining aligned with human values. This emphasis on safety comes as investment in AI safety research remains relatively small compared to overall AI development funding.
The precise investment terms from Alphabet and Nvidia remain undisclosed, with spokespersons for all three companies declining comment.
