Alphabet (GOOGL, Financials) and Nvidia (NVDA, Financials) have invested in Safe Superintelligence, a startup co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, according to a person familiar with the matter cited by Reuters.

The startup, known as SSI, was recently valued at $32 billion in a funding round led by venture capital firm Greenoaks, Reuters reported. The investment adds to the growing interest from major cloud and chip firms in backing artificial intelligence developers that require substantial computing infrastructure.

Alongside the funding, Alphabet has signed SSI as an anchor customer for its in-house tensor processing units, or TPUs, according to Reuters. Darren Mowry, managing director for startup partnerships at Google Cloud, told Reuters the company is expanding external access to its proprietary AI chips. Google originally reserved TPUs for internal use but has since shifted to selling them at scale to companies developing foundational AI models.

SSI is using TPUs primarily over Nvidia's widely adopted graphics processing units, which currently hold more than 80% of the AI chip market, Reuters said, citing unnamed sources.

Google Cloud offers both TPUs and Nvidia GPUs to clients. The company's custom TPUs are optimized for certain AI workloads and are designed to be more efficient than general-purpose GPUs, Reuters reported. The strategy mirrors moves by other cloud providers, including Amazon (AMZN, Financials), which is developing its own chips called Trainium and Inferentia.

Amazon has also invested in Anthropic, an OpenAI competitor, which continues to use Google's chips despite Amazon's backing, Reuters reported. Microsoft (MSFT, Financials), meanwhile, has invested heavily in OpenAI.

Spokespeople for Alphabet, Nvidia and SSI declined to comment, according to Reuters.

Reuters also reported that Nvidia has backed other AI startups, including Elon Musk's xAI, as part of its broader push into the AI ecosystem.

The investment by Alphabet and Nvidia underscores the deepening ties between infrastructure providers and AI startups that are becoming major customers of their computing platforms, Reuters said.