Alphabet and Nvidia have made significant investments in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), an AI startup co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, former chief scientist at OpenAI. SSI has been valued at $32 billion following a recent funding round led by Greenoaks. The startup is focused on advanced AI research, necessitating extensive computing resources.
Alphabet's cloud division is providing SSI with its proprietary Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), marking a strategic pivot towards the external sale of AI hardware. This move indicates a growing trend among tech giants to forge partnerships that enhance their competitiveness in the rapidly evolving AI sector. While Nvidia's GPUs currently dominate the AI chip market, SSI's reliance on Google’s TPUs highlights a unique collaboration within the industry.
This investment not only reinforces the importance of hardware and infrastructure in AI development but also signals a potential shift in market dynamics as companies seek to leverage each other's strengths. As the demand for advanced AI capabilities continues to rise, such collaborations may redefine the landscape of AI technology and its applications.