Nvidia (NVDA) has spent the past year proving it is the backbone of nearly every major artificial intelligence (AI) project on the planet, from the biggest cloud companies to the smallest AI startups trying to find their footing.
Nvidia is known as a company that supplies GPUs to OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet (GOOGL). Now, it is putting capital and hardware behind one of the most secretive AI labs in the industry, a company that has been flying under the radar since it launched two years ago. Let's take a closer look.
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www.barchart.com Nvidia Widens AI Moat
Valued at a market capitalization of over $4.7 trillion, Nvidia is the second-largest company in the world behind Apple (AAPL). In the fiscal first quarter of 2027 (ended in April 2026), the company reported revenue of $81.6 billion, an increase of 85% year-over-year (YOY). Data-center sales rose 92% to $75.2 billion.
CEO Jensen Huang has emphasized that demand for GPUs has gone parabolic because of agentic AI, which are AI systems that can act and reason on their own. Model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to produce more tokens, the basic unit of AI output, as those tokens now generate real revenue.
Nvidia's newest platform, Vera Rubin, is central to that race. The company said production shipments will begin in Q3, and executives expect it to be an even bigger success than its Grace Blackwell predecessor. Essentially every major hyperscaler and frontier AI lab is lining up to use Vera Rubin.
These trends explain why Nvidia's latest move is such a big deal for the AI industry.
Nvidia Invests in Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence
Safe Superintelligence (SSI) recently announced a long-term partnership with Nvidia, alongside a fresh investment from the chipmaker. The goal is to rapidly accelerate SSI's growth.
SSI was founded in 2024 by OpenAI co-founder and CEO Ilya Sutskever, along with Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross. Sutskever helped lay the technical groundwork for modern AI, contributing to breakthroughs including AlexNet, AlphaGo, and the GPT-model family, and leading research that eventually produced reasoning models.
Unlike most AI labs chasing chatbots or coding tools, SSI has one stated mission: building safe superintelligence. The company has largely stayed out of the spotlight, quietly developing what it calls a new research direction aimed at powerful, robustly aligned AI, according to a statement.
With Nvidia's investment and access to the Vera Rubin platform, SSI expects to increase its compute capacity by an order of magnitude. The two companies also plan to work together on future Nvidia compute platforms, drawing on SSI's research to help shape what comes next.
"Ilya has pioneered fundamental breakthroughs at the foundation of modern AI, beginning with AlexNet," said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in the statement. "We are excited to see what new breakthroughs SSI will discover powered by our Vera Rubin platform."
Sutskever framed the deal as validation of years of quiet work. "We have research that is worthy of scaling up, and having access to a big Nvidia computer will let us do so," he said. "We're incredibly proud to be partnering with Jensen and the Nvidia team, and we are confident that our big bet on the Vera Rubin platform will take us to the next level."
What the SSI Deal Means for NVDA Stock
SSI already counts Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital among its backers, so the lab was never short on cash or credibility. What it needed was raw computing power, which is why it inked a deal with Nvidia.
For Nvidia, the move fits a pattern investors have watched play out all year. During its fiscal first-quarter earnings call, Huang noted the company deepened its collaboration with Anthropic and is helping expand that lab's compute capacity across multiple cloud providers. Backing SSI extends the same playbook to yet another frontier lab, further widening Nvidia's footprint across the AI research world.
Huang has repeatedly said Nvidia aims to run every frontier AI model, not just the ones already famous. Locking in a relationship with Sutskever, one of the most respected researchers in the field, gives the company early exposure to whatever SSI eventually builds.
It also reinforces Nvidia's own guidance. Management has pointed to $1 trillion in combined Blackwell and Vera Rubin revenue expected between 2025 and calendar 2027, with additional upside from new products like the Vera CPU. Deals like this one with SSI are part of how that number keeps climbing, one partnership at a time.
Out of the 47 analysts covering NVDA stock, 43 recommend a “Strong Buy,” three recommend a “Moderate Buy” rating, and one recommends a “Strong Sell." The average price target of $304.32 represents potential upside of 60% from current levels.
www.barchart.com On the date of publication, Aditya Raghunath did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. For more information please view the Barchart Disclosure Policy here.
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