SAN FRANCISCO, April 11 – Alphabet and Nvidia have invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to a source familiar with the matter.
SSI, just months old, has quickly risen to prominence in the AI space and was recently valued at $32 billion in a funding round led by Greenoaks.
The move reflects renewed interest from big tech players in supporting next-generation AI startups that require massive computing power. As part of the collaboration, Google Cloud signed a deal making SSI an anchor customer for its in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) — custom chips designed to rival Nvidia’s market-leading GPUs.
“With these foundational model builders, the gravity is increasing dramatically over to us,” said Darren Mowry, managing director of Google Cloud’s startup partnerships.
SSI is primarily using Google’s TPUs over Nvidia’s GPUs, according to two sources, highlighting a shift in chip preference among advanced AI developers. TPUs are optimized for specific AI tasks and are more power-efficient than general-purpose chips.
Google originally reserved TPUs for internal use but is now expanding access to external AI companies. The move follows a similar trend by cloud giants investing in foundational model startups that also become major customers of their infrastructure — as seen with Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic and Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI.
While Nvidia remains dominant with over 80% of the AI chip market, both Alphabet and Amazon are positioning their custom silicon as strong alternatives.
The terms of Alphabet and Nvidia’s investments in SSI have not been disclosed. All three companies declined to comment.
