Big Bets on AI: Alphabet and Nvidia Invest in Ilya Sutskever's $32 Billion Startup

Alphabet and Nvidia's Major Investment in AI

Alphabet and Nvidia have made significant investments in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI. This startup has recently been valued at a staggering $32 billion following a funding round led by Greenoaks, a prominent venture capital firm.

Growing Interest in AI Infrastructure

The investment reflects the increasing interest from major cloud and chip companies in supporting AI developers that require extensive computing resources. Alphabet has also appointed SSI as an anchor customer for its proprietary tensor processing units (TPUs), indicating a shift in strategy to expand access to these advanced AI chips previously reserved for internal use.

Shift from Nvidia to TPUs

Interestingly, SSI is opting to utilize TPUs instead of Nvidia's popular graphics processing units (GPUs), which dominate the AI chip market with over 80% share. This move highlights Google's intention to optimize AI workloads through its custom TPUs, which are designed to be more efficient compared to general-purpose GPUs.

Competition Among Tech Giants

Other tech giants are also in the race to develop AI infrastructure. Amazon is working on its own chips, Trainium and Inferentia, and has invested in Anthropic, a competitor of OpenAI. Meanwhile, Microsoft has heavily invested in OpenAI, further intensifying the competition in the AI space.

Conclusion

The collaboration between Alphabet, Nvidia, and SSI underscores the evolving relationship between AI startups and infrastructure providers, as these startups become increasingly vital customers for computing platforms.