Ilya Gets $5 Billion Bet from Jensen Huang: 'It's Time to Scale'

Ilya Sutskever's company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), has partnered with NVIDIA in a long-term strategic alliance. Under the agreement, NVIDIA will grant SSI access to its upcoming Vera Rubin platform, with the goal of scaling SSI's compute power by tenfold over the next year. While the exact investment amount remains undisclosed, multiple media sources report a figure of $5 billion. SSI, founded in June 2024, focuses exclusively on achieving safe superintelligence (ASI) through fundamental architectural and training innovations, rather than chatbots or consumer products. The company has raised significant capital in two rounds: $1 billion in September 2024 at a $5 billion valuation, and $2 billion in April 2025 at a $32 billion valuation, with investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Greenoaks, Alphabet, and NVIDIA. Despite not having released any models, papers, or demos, SSI's progress convinced NVIDIA to invest after being allowed to review SSI's research. Ilya stated, 'It's time to scale,' referencing the scaling law that he previously championed at OpenAI, which led to GPT-3 and the broader scaling trend in AI.