Elon Musk ordered thousands of Nvidia-made AI chips destined for Tesla to be diverted to his social media company X, according to emails from the chipmaker obtained by CNBC. The move has the potential to delay Tesla’s acquisition of $500 million worth of processors by months, the outlet reports.
Tesla is supposed to be stocking up on Nvidia’s H100 artificial intelligence chips in order to power its transformation into “a leader in AI and robotics,” according to Musk. In an Tesla earnings call earlier this year, he said the company would increase its acquisition of H100s from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of this year. And later, in a post on X, Musk said that Tesla would spend $10 billion “in combined training and inference AI, the latter being primarily in car.”
Tesla will spend around $10B this year in combined training and inference AI, the latter being primarily in car.
Any company not spending at this level, and doing so efficiently, cannot compete.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2024
But emails by Nvidia employees obtained by CNBC suggest that Musk is exaggerating the purchase of AI chips for Tesla. Instead, many of those processors are now en route 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 originally slated for Tesla to X instead,” an Nvidia memo from December said, according to CNBC. “In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.” In follow-up messages, Nvidia employees noted that Musk’s comments during the earnings call and in subsequent posts on X “conflicts with bookings.”
In a post on X after CNBC’s story published, Musk said that Tesla lacked the capacity to accept the Nvidia GPUs because the company’s factory in Austin, Texas, is incomplete. He also estimated that Tesla would spend $3-4 billion on AI chips from Nvidia in 2024.
Tesla had no place to send the Nvidia chips to turn them on, so they would have just sat in a warehouse.
The south extension of Giga Texas is almost complete. This will house 50k H100s for FSD training.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2024
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/4/24171165/elon-musk-tesla-x-nvidia-ai-chips-divert