On July 27, SSI announced on X a "long-term strategic partnership" with Nvidia: Nvidia is making what SSI calls "a substantial investment" that will let the company 10x its compute over the next 12 months. Neither side disclosed the size of the check, but the Financial Times reports it's a $5 billion commitment. The news broke as a WSJ exclusive, and SSI's own account amplified it within hours.
What's actually in the deal
Per reporting, the partnership gives SSI access to Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin GPU systems, layered on top of — not replacing — the Google Cloud TPU arrangement SSI struck at Google Cloud Next back in April 2025. That earlier moment is also where Nvidia first showed up on SSI's cap table: Alphabet and Nvidia both joined the $2 billion round that valued SSI at $32 billion, alongside Greenoaks Capital (which led with $500 million), Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, and DST Global. So this isn't a cold first bet — it's Nvidia doubling down on a company it already backed, and adding a hardware relationship on top of the equity one.
Nvidia says it was granted access to SSI's closely-guarded research before committing — notable, because SSI is one of the only labs of its size and valuation that has published essentially nothing.
The part that makes this unusual
SSI was founded in June 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy, days after Sutskever left OpenAI as its chief scientist. Two years later, it reportedly still employs only a few dozen people — including a research team in Tel Aviv — and has released no product and published no paper describing what it's building. SSI's own line in the announcement, "we reached the point where our research is worth scaling," is close to the only public statement the company has ever made about its own progress. A $32 billion valuation built almost entirely on Sutskever's reputation and a research thesis nobody outside the company has seen is unusual even by AI-lab standards — which makes a fresh, sizable Nvidia infrastructure commitment as much a signal to the market as it is a GPU order.
Why Nvidia says yes anyway
This fits a pattern rather than standing alone. Nvidia has taken a $30 billion equity stake in OpenAI's latest round, put up to $15 billion combined with Microsoft into Anthropic, backed xAI's 2024 raise, and repeatedly added to its CoreWeave position — more than $540 billion in these deals across 2026 alone, according to reporting that's revived scrutiny over "circular financing": Nvidia's capital funding the very labs whose GPU orders keep Nvidia's growth story intact. Betting on a lab with no shipped product is a bigger reach than the OpenAI or Anthropic deals — but it buys Nvidia the same thing those larger checks do: a seat at the table, and a claim on the compute demand, of whichever frontier lab ends up mattering.