Alphabet and Nvidia Back $32B AI Startup SSI Led by OpenAI Co-Founder

Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) have invested in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a fast-rising AI startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to a source familiar with the matter. The startup, recently valued at $32 billion in a funding round led by Greenoaks, is gaining attention for its focus on advanced AI model research and substantial computing demands.

The investment reflects growing interest from tech giants in supporting next-gen AI firms that require high-performance computing infrastructure. Earlier this week, Alphabet’s cloud division announced a deal to supply SSI with tensor processing units (TPUs), Google's proprietary AI chips, marking a shift from exclusively internal use to broader commercialization.

While Nvidia continues to dominate the AI chip market with over 80% share, SSI is reportedly using TPUs instead of GPUs for its development work. Google Cloud offers both Nvidia GPUs and its TPUs, with the latter optimized for specific AI tasks, offering better efficiency for training large-scale models.

This move highlights Google’s dual approach—investing in and providing infrastructure to leading AI labs like SSI and Anthropic. Google and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) have collectively poured billions into Anthropic, while Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has heavily backed OpenAI. Nvidia has also invested in OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI.

Amazon, a rising competitor, is developing its own AI chips—Trainium and Inferentia—and has already partnered with Anthropic to power a massive supercomputer using its processors. Despite these developments, sources confirm Anthropic still actively uses and spends on Google’s TPUs.

The trend of cloud providers investing in AI startups underscores a strategic loop where infrastructure investment drives long-term cloud service revenue. Alphabet and Nvidia’s latest support for SSI places them firmly in the center of AI’s competitive landscape.