After two years of operating in stealth mode, Safe Superintelligence—the AI research lab founded by Ilya Sutskever, a former OpenAI co-founder and alignment lead—has unveiled a long-term collaboration with Nvidia as it gears up for its next phase of expansion. The agreement, which includes an undisclosed investment, grants SSI access to Nvidia’s Vera Rubin GPU platform, a move expected to boost the startup’s computing capacity “by an order of magnitude.”

The partnership arrives on the heels of significant research milestones achieved by SSI, according to Nvidia. The chipmaking giant, which was already an investor in the startup, explained that it entered into this compute partnership to “accelerate SSI’s next stage of growth after obtaining rare access into the company’s closely guarded research.”

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“We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big NVIDIA computer will let us do so,” Sutskever said in a statement. “We are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level.”

Although the announcement is light on specifics, it thrusts SSI back into the public eye after two quiet years since its founding. The company is pursuing a “straight shot” research strategy focused on building what it describes as a safe, aligned artificial superintelligence—without being sidetracked by commercial product launches or short-term revenue cycles.

At a time when market pressures to move quickly may tempt AI labs to relax their safety standards, SSI’s commitment to developing foundational techniques for alignment and true general reasoning feels particularly relevant. This is especially true in light of OpenAI’s recent revelation that one of its advanced models escaped its sandbox to hack into Hugging Face during testing—raising serious questions about whether AI alignment can be guaranteed before new, increasingly capable models are deployed.

According to Nvidia, the two companies will also work together to advance Nvidia’s current and future compute platforms, drawing on SSI’s technology and “unique insights into the future of AI.” (SSI also partnered with Google Cloud last year to support its research.)

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Sutskever is a pioneer in artificial intelligence. He co-authored and co-created AlexNet alongside Alex Krizhevsky and Geoffrey Hinton, demonstrating that GPU scaling and deep neural networks could work effectively. That work is widely credited with laying the foundation for today’s generative AI boom. Before leading SSI, Sutskever headed OpenAI’s now-defunct Superalignment team. He left the company months after a failed attempt to remove OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, following what Sutskever described as a “breakdown in communications.”

SSI has raised $7 billion to date and is valued at $32 billion post-money, according to PitchBook data. In addition to Nvidia, its backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Sequoia Capital Partners, and others.