NVIDIA puts $5bn into Safe Superintelligence, which has never shipped anything
Safe Superintelligence has raised $7 billion in total at a $32 billion valuation, employs a few dozen people, and has released no product. NVIDIA's $5 billion comes with access to the Vera Rubin platform and is expected to increase SSI's available compute tenfold within twelve months.
The valuation is not being set by revenue, users or benchmarks, because there are none. It is being set by the founder's track record and by scarcity of the people who can plausibly attempt this work. That is a legitimate basis for a bet and it is a completely different asset class from anything with a product attached.
The compute term is the more interesting half. A tenfold capacity increase inside a year, tied to a specific platform, converts an abstract investment into something with a physical schedule. It also puts SSI on the same footing as the pattern running through this week: hardware access supplied by the party taking the equity.
Reported previous backers include Alphabet, Google Cloud, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and Sequoia. A company with no product, thirty-two billion dollars of paper value and the compute of a mid-sized lab is an unusual object, and it is worth being precise that this is what is being financed rather than a research result.
Bloomberg — NVIDIA to invest $5B in Ilya Sutskever's AI startup Safe Superintelligence → · TechCrunch — Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence partners with NVIDIA to scale its AI research → · Calcalist — Safe Superintelligence raises $5 billion from NVIDIA despite not yet releasing a product →