According to emails obtained from Nvidia by CNBC, Elon Musk has instructed the transfer of thousands of artificial intelligence chips manufactured by Nvidia and intended for Tesla to his company X Social. This transfer may potentially delay Tesla’s acquisition of $500 million worth of chips for several months.
Tesla aims to advance in the fields of artificial intelligence and robots by equipping itself with H100 chips from Nvidia. According to Elon Musk’s vision, the company’s owner, Tesla is working towards significantly increasing its acquisition of these chips by the end of the current year. The company is also expected to invest a significant amount of up to $10 billion in the development and training of artificial intelligence, especially in the automotive sector. Despite some reservations from Nvidia employees, there is a clear inclination towards using xAI chips in the company’s future applications.
Through a memo issued by Nvidia in December, it was revealed that Elon Musk places great importance on launching a group of GPU H100 in X instead of Tesla. 12,000 H100 units originally designated for Tesla were redirected to X based on his directions. On the other hand, the original orders for X of 12,000 H100 units for January and June were redirected to Tesla. In follow-up messages, Nvidia employees noted that Musk’s statements during the earnings call and in his subsequent posts about X “contradict the reservations.”
The transfer of Tesla’s artificial intelligence chips by Elon Musk to X could raise concerns among Tesla investors, who rely on Musk to fulfill his promise of self-driving cars. The company plans to unveil its first self-driving taxi in an event in August. While Tesla’s self-driving features, which are the cornerstone of the company’s operations in the realm of autonomy, face scrutiny due to several accidents, some of which resulted in fatalities.
The emerging xAI artificial intelligence company was founded by Elon Musk and competes with OpenAI, Google, and other companies to develop innovative applications in generative artificial intelligence and deep language models. Last month, the company announced a $6 billion funding round with the goal of offering advanced products and robust infrastructure to support them.
Nvidia has been steadily advancing to become the third largest company in the world by value due to the increasing demand for the graphics processing units (GPUs) it produces. These units are considered a crucial support for the advancement of technology and artificial intelligence in many other companies. During an earnings call in May, the company’s CEO, Jensen Huang, stated that customers are quickly depleting all available units. Nvidia has recorded significant revenue growth of up to 200% in the last quarter.
