Alphabet and Nvidia have joined major venture capital funds in investing in Safe Superintelligence (SSI), a startup co-founded by former OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.

According to a close source, just a few months after its establishment, SSI has quickly become one of the most valuable Artificial Intelligence (AI) startups today.

The investment signals a renewed interest from tech giants and infrastructure providers in strategically investing in startups developing cutting-edge AI, a field that is increasingly in need of computing power. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced earlier this week that it would provide SSI with access to its own custom-built AI chips (TPUs) through its cloud computing division.

SSI was recently valued at around $32 billion in a funding round led by Greenoaks, according to sources. The company is now one of the world’s hottest AI startups, thanks in large part to the reputation of Mr. Sutskever, who has a vision for the future of AI development.

Like many of its rivals, SSI is in dire need of chips. Alphabet’s parallel moves—from its parent company to its cloud division—show that its AI hardware strategy is changing, as AI labs like SSI and Anthropic emerge.

Initially, Google only used TPU chips for internal operations. However, the deal to supply large quantities of these chips to SSI for AI research marked a new step to expand revenue from external customers.

Meanwhile, AI developers have long favored Nvidia's graphics processing units (GPUs), which account for more than 80% of the AI ​​chip market share.

However, according to two sources, SSI is currently mainly using TPUs instead of GPUs in research and development activities.

Google and Nvidia are also competing with Amazon, which is developing its own line of AI chips, called Trainium and Inferentia.

Amazon has announced that Anthropic will use technology based on these chips starting in 2023. Last December, Amazon announced that it would provide Anthropic with a new supercomputer with hundreds of thousands of in-house chips.

It is now becoming a common trend for major cloud providers to invest heavily in AI startups.

These are startups that both build foundational AI models and are important customers using their computing infrastructure.

For example, Amazon and Google have both invested in Anthropic, while Microsoft has made a big bet on OpenAI. Nvidia has also backed both OpenAI and xAI, the AI ​​company founded by billionaire Elon Musk./.

Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/google-va-nvidia-dau-tu-lon-vao-cong-ty-khoi-nghiep-tri-tue-nhan-tao-post1027702.vnp