Alphabet and Nvidia have joined top venture capital firms in backing Safe Superintelligence (SSI), the AI startup co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. SSI has quickly gained prominence, reportedly reaching a $32 billion valuation in a funding round led by Greenoaks, underscoring the surging demand and strategic importance of cutting-edge AI development.
Alphabet’s cloud division has also signed a deal to supply SSI with its proprietary tensor processing units (TPUs), a significant move as Google shifts from in-house TPU use to selling them at scale to select AI labs. Darren Mowry, a Google Cloud executive, noted the growing traction TPUs have gained among major AI model builders.
While Nvidia maintains a dominant 80% share in the AI chip market, SSI has opted primarily for Google’s TPUs in its research, highlighting a potential shift in the AI hardware landscape. Google Cloud continues to offer both TPUs and Nvidia GPUs to customers, including other leading AI firms like Anthropic and Apple.
Amazon is also advancing its AI chip strategy with Trainium and Inferentia, securing Anthropic as an early customer. Despite that, Anthropic continues to heavily use TPUs for its model training, indicating sustained demand across chip platforms.
Big tech’s strategic investments in startups like SSI, OpenAI, and Anthropic reinforce a pattern where cloud providers support AI innovators who, in turn, become major customers of their computing infrastructure. The latest funding in SSI reflects this trend, as Alphabet and Nvidia deepen their roles in shaping the next generation of AI.
Source: Swifteradio.com.
