Tesla CEO, Elon Musk (L), and Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang (R).
Reuters
In November 2023, at an all-hands assembly with staff, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was requested whether or not the corporate would observe the lead of Apple and Disney and droop its promoting on X on account of rising ranges of antisemitism and different hate speech on the platform.
X proprietor Elon Musk mentioned earlier that month that he agreed with a publish on the positioning that accused “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred in opposition to whites.” Quite a few manufacturers — Disney and Apple amongst them — moved shortly to pause their advert campaigns.
Huang’s response was agency however diplomatic, in keeping with individuals who have been listening to the assembly however requested to not be named as a result of they weren’t approved to talk to the press. He mentioned the chipmaker hadn’t marketed on X in a really very long time and had no plans to take action. Nevertheless, Huang additionally emphasised that Nvidia would by no means make public statements in opposition to one other enterprise.
Unnoticed of Huang’s commentary on the time was any element concerning Nvidia’s growing coziness with Musk’s enterprise empire.
Nvidia is seeing hovering demand for its graphics processing items (GPUs) and associated {hardware} and companies, a increase that is lifted the corporate’s market cap properly previous $2 trillion. Nvidia’s merchandise, together with new accelerator chips, present computing energy for generative synthetic intelligence workloads, robotics, analysis and information middle initiatives.
Income within the newest quarter jumped a whopping 265% to $22.1 billion, and final yr Nvidia surpassed Intel in complete gross sales.
Musk has made guarantees that his corporations will develop refined AI merchandise, and doing so requires shopping for up loads of Nvidia’s know-how.
Their cozy relationship was on show this week at Nvidia’s annual GTC convention in San Jose, California. The occasion, which attracted roughly 16,000 attendees together with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Kendrick Lamar, had two periods that includes leaders of xAI, the startup Musk formally revealed in July 2023.
Christian Szegedy, a co-founder and analysis scientist at xAI who beforehand labored at Google, spoke at a fireplace chat with Bojan Tunguz, an information scientist at Nvidia. One other co-founder and analysis engineer from xAI, Igor Babuschkin, a veteran of OpenAI and Google, gave an outline of how Musk’s startup is utilizing Nvidia GPUs to assist “speed up coaching and inference of their Grok mannequin,” referring to the startup’s AI chatbot.
In Nvidia’s press launch on Monday asserting the launch of its Blackwell AI chips, Musk was quoted saying, “There may be presently nothing higher than NVIDIA {hardware} for AI.”
Musk, who helped create OpenAI earlier than a public break up with CEO Sam Altman and different founders, launched xAI to develop AI fashions and software program merchandise.
In the meantime, his electrical car maker Tesla has spent years engaged on AI software program to show its automobiles into autonomous automobiles. It is also now creating the Tesla Bot, or Optimus, a humanoid robotic.
Whereas the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s income comes from its automotive enterprise, Musk usually encourages shareholders to think about it in a different way. In January he mentioned, in a post on X, “Tesla is an AI/robotics firm that seems to many to be a automobile firm.”
Tesla first mentioned plans to construct a “Dojo supercomputer” at an AI Day presentation in August 2021. The intention for Dojo was to course of and practice AI fashions with big quantities of video and information captured by Tesla automobiles.
‘Boy, do they need much more GPUs’
Nvidia is on the coronary heart of its AI efforts. Final August, former Tesla AI engineer Tim Zaman posted on X {that a} Tesla AI cluster, constructed utilizing 10,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips, was able to go stay.
Musk mentioned a publish on X in January that whereas a Dojo supercomputer value $500 million to construct, “Tesla will spend greater than that on Nvidia {hardware} this yr.” He added, “The desk stakes for being aggressive in AI are at the least a number of billion {dollars} per yr at this level.”
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.”
Larry Ellison, chairman and co-founder of Oracle Corp., speaks during the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
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 publish on X that accused Nvidia of “spiking the value” of its GPUs, which it might do due to the provision scarcity.
Musk wrote that aggressive chips have been in improvement, and that “Nvidia won’t have a monopoly on large-scale coaching & inference ceaselessly.”
The remarks failed to impress Huang.
Talking at The New York Occasions’ DealBook summit a couple of months later, Huang credited Musk and OpenAI for the choice to develop Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer, the DGX system, beginning again in 2012.
Huang mentioned it took Nvidia about 5 years to good and ship the supercomputer, which he personally delivered to Musk to be used by OpenAI.
“Elon noticed it, and he goes, ‘I need a type of’ — he instructed me about OpenAI,” Huang mentioned on stage. “I delivered the world’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI on that day.”
A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to remark. Tesla and xAI did not reply to requests for remark.
