David Silver, the DeepMind researcher who led the AlphaGo and AlphaZero projects, has taken his next venture to a new scale. Ineffable Intelligence, the London startup he founded, revealed on June 16 that it will run its flagship AI lab on Google Cloud’s most powerful infrastructure. The announcement came during Google Cloud’s London summit, where the company highlighted the partnership as a showcase of its AI Hypercomputer capabilities.
According to the lab, the arrangement will involve one of the largest clusters of Google’s A5X instances, each equipped with Nvidia’s forthcoming Vera Rubin NVL72 GPUs. Silver emphasized that the decision was not about raw compute alone. He praised Google Cloud’s integrated stack – from Jupiter networking to optimized storage – as essential for the tightly coupled training and inference cycles his superlearner concept demands.
The superlearner, as Ineffable describes it, would learn from its own experience, progressing from basic motor skills to scientific breakthroughs without relying on human‑curated datasets. That ambition, Silver explained, places unique demands on hardware: high‑performance networking, massive storage bandwidth, and the ability to switch seamlessly between training and inference workloads.
Google Cloud’s chief executive, Thomas Kurian, called the collaboration a proof point that frontier AI labs are choosing Google to move faster. He noted that the partnership extends the deepening tie between Google Cloud and Nvidia, whose Vera Rubin platform anchors the new cluster.
Beyond the technical details, the deal carries a geographic signal. By basing the lab in London and leveraging American‑supplied infrastructure, Ineffable positions itself as a cornerstone of Europe’s AI ambitions, a narrative policymakers have been eager to promote. The continent, wary of dependence on U.S. AI giants, now has a high‑profile research effort that remains physically rooted in Europe.
Ineffable’s financial backing underscores the confidence investors have placed in Silver’s track record. The startup raised a $1.1 billion seed round – the largest in European history – and later secured additional funding from Sequoia and Nvidia, pushing its valuation to $5.1 billion despite having no product, revenue, or public roadmap. The market appears to be betting on the founder’s reputation and the plausibility of the superlearner thesis rather than any shipped technology.
While the infrastructure is now in place, the scientific outcome remains uncertain. Silver’s previous work proved that self‑play can master complex games; whether that approach can scale to the breadth of human knowledge is an open question. Nonetheless, the partnership gives Ineffable the computational horsepower to attempt the experiment.
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