Elon Musk companies are gobbling up Nvidia hardware even as Tesla aims to build rival supercomputer
- by NBC Connecticut
- Mar 21, 2024
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- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told employees at an all-hands meeting in November that the chipmaker wasn't buying ads on X and didn't have plans to do so.
- Nvidia is getting increasingly cozy with Elon Musk's collection of companies in other ways.
- Tesla and xAI are spending heavily on Nvidia's artificial intelligence systems, even as Tesla aims to build a supercomputer to rival Nvidia systems.
Money Report
'Boy, do they want a lot more GPUs'
Nvidia is at the heart of its AI efforts. Last August, former Tesla AI engineer Tim Zaman posted on X that a Tesla AI cluster, built using 10,000 of Nvidia's H100 chips, was ready to go live. Musk said a post on X in January that while a Dojo supercomputer cost $500 million to build, "Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware this year." He added, "The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at least several billion dollars per year at this point." And on Tesla's fourth-quarter earnings call in January, an analyst asked Tesla executives to give an update on Dojo, and whether the company had a "sufficient supply of Nvidia GPUs needed for the training of the system." Musk said Tesla was "pursuing the dual path of Nvidia and Dojo," seemingly implying that it's building Dojo without Nvidia's technology but using it elsewhere. Musk described Dojo as "a long shot worth taking because the payoff is potentially very high. But it's not something that is a high probability." Oracle founder Larry Ellison, a close friend of Musk's, former Tesla board member and investor in X, said in December on his company's earnings call that xAI had secured Nvidia GPUs through Oracle to create the first version of Grok, but that Oracle wasn't able to meet Musk's demands. "Boy, do they want a lot more GPUs than we gave them," Ellison said. "We gave them quite a few, but they wanted more and we are in the process of getting them more." While Musk and Huang have a longstanding connection and are now doing more business together than ever, the relationship hasn't always appeared friendly. Last June, Musk went so far as to call Nvidia monopolistic, in response to a post on X that accused Nvidia of "spiking the price" of its GPUs, which it could do because of the supply shortage. Musk wrote that competitive chips were in development, and that "Nvidia will not have a monopoly on large-scale training & inference forever." The remarks failed to provoke Huang. Speaking at The New York Times' DealBook summit a few months later, Huang credited Musk and OpenAI for the decision to develop Nvidia's first AI supercomputer, the DGX system, starting back in 2012. Huang said it took Nvidia about five years to perfect and ship the supercomputer, which he personally delivered to Musk for use by OpenAI. "Elon saw it, and he goes, 'I want one of those' — he told me about OpenAI," Huang said on stage. "I delivered the world's first AI supercomputer to OpenAI on that day." A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to comment. Tesla and xAI didn't respond to requests for comment. WATCH: Why 'open' AI might be more marketing than reality
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