Elon Musk ordered 1000’s of Nvidia-made AI chips destined for Tesla to be diverted to his social media firm X, based on emails from the chipmaker obtained by CNBC. The transfer has the potential to delay Tesla’s acquisition of $500 million price of processors by months, the outlet reviews.
Tesla is meant to be stocking up on Nvidia’s H100 synthetic intelligence chips so as to energy its transformation into “a frontrunner in AI and robotics,” based on Musk. In an Tesla earnings name earlier this yr, he mentioned the corporate would enhance its acquisition of H100s from 35,000 to 85,000 by the top of this yr. And later, in a submit on X, Musk mentioned that Tesla would spend $10 billion “in mixed coaching and inference AI, the latter being primarily in automobile.”
However emails by Nvidia workers obtained by CNBC counsel that Musk is exaggerating the acquisition of AI chips for Tesla. As a substitute, lots of these processors at the moment are en path to X — and primarily its AI subsidiary, xAI.
“Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs initially slated for Tesla to X as an alternative,” an Nvidia memo from December mentioned, based on CNBC. “In change, unique X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.” In follow-up messages, Nvidia workers famous that Musk’s feedback through the earnings name and in subsequent posts on X “conflicts with bookings.”
The transfer to divert AI chips from Tesla to X might rankle Tesla traders, who’re betting on Musk delivering his promise of absolutely autonomous autos. The corporate plans to unveil its first robotaxi car at an occasion in August. In the meantime, Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver-assist options, which function a bedrock for the corporate’s autonomy work, have come below scrutiny for tons of of crashes, dozens of which have resulted in fatalities.
Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is racing towards OpenAI, Google, and others to provide helpful purposes for generative AI and their underlying massive language fashions. Final month, the corporate introduced a $6 billion funding spherical on the promise of superior merchandise and the infrastructure to help them.
Nvidia has turn into the third most respected firm on the earth on the demand of its GPUs, which energy a lot of the AI ambitions of different firms. With cloud computing and generative AI, prospects “are consuming each GPU that’s on the market,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang mentioned on an earnings name in Might, based on CNBC. The corporate reported 200 % income progress over the last quarter.