Tesla CEO Musk (left) and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (right).
Reuters
In November 2023, at the all-staff meeting, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was asked if the company would follow suit apple and disney Advertising on X has been suspended due to rising anti-Semitism and other hate speech on the platform.
X owner Musk said earlier this month that he agreed with a post on the site that accused the “Jewish community” of promoting “hatred of white people.” Many brands — Disney and Apple among them — moved quickly to pause ad campaigns.
Huang’s response was both firm and diplomatic, according to people who attended the meeting but asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak to the media. He said the chipmaker has not advertised on X for a long time and has no plans to do so. However, Huang Renxun also emphasized that Nvidia will never make public statements about other businesses.
Huang’s comments at the time did not mention any details about Nvidia’s growing rapport with Musk’s business empire.
Demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) and related hardware and services continues to soar, a boom that has boosted the company’s market value to well over $2 trillion. Nvidia’s products, including new accelerator chips, provide computing power for generating artificial intelligence workloads, robotics, research and data center projects.
Revenue surged 265% to $22.1 billion in the latest quarter, and Nvidia’s total sales surpassed Intel’s last year.
Musk has promised that his company will develop sophisticated artificial intelligence products, and doing so will require purchasing large amounts of Nvidia’s technology.
Their close relationship was on display this week at Nvidia Annual GTC Conference In San Jose, California. The startup, which Musk officially revealed in July 2023, attracted about 16,000 attendees, including celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Kendrick Lamar , and hosted two sessions with xAI leaders.
xAI co-founder and research scientist Christian Szegedy, who previously worked at Google, spoke during a fireside chat with Nvidia data scientist Bojan Tunguz. Igor Babuschkin, another co-founder and research engineer at xAI and an OpenAI and Google veteran, outlined how Musk’s startup is using Nvidia GPUs to help “accelerate the training and inference of its Grok models,” referring to the new Startup’s AI chatbot.
At NVIDIA Press release When announcing the launch of the Blackwell AI chip on Monday, Musk said: “There is currently no better AI hardware than NVIDIA hardware.”
Musk helped create OpenAI and launched xAI to develop artificial intelligence models and software products before publicly splitting with CEO Sam Altman and other founders.
Meanwhile, his electric car maker Tesla It has spent years developing artificial intelligence software to turn its cars into self-driving cars. The company is also currently developing Tesla Bot, or Optimus, a humanoid robot.
While the vast majority of Tesla’s revenue comes from its automotive business, Musk often encourages shareholders to think about it differently. In January he said, In X’s post, “Tesla is an AI/robotics company that looks to many like a car company.”
Tesla discusses plans to build “Dojo supercomputer” for the first time in Artificial Intelligence Day speech August 2021. Dojo’s goal is to use the vast amounts of footage and data captured by Tesla vehicles to process and train AI models.
“Oh my gosh, do they want more GPUs?”
Nvidia is at the heart of its artificial intelligence efforts. In August last year, former Tesla AI engineer Tim Zaman posted on X that the Tesla AI cluster built using 10,000 Nvidia H100 chips was ready to go online.
Musk posted on X in January that while the Dojo supercomputer cost $500 million to build, “Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware this year.” He added, “Currently, in Remaining competitive in the field of artificial intelligence requires at least billions of dollars per year.”
Musk said that Tesla is “pursuing a dual path of Nvidia and Dojo,” which seemed to imply that Tesla is not using Nvidia’s technology to build Dojo, but using it elsewhere. Musk described Dojo as “a long shot worth trying because the payoff could be very high. But it’s not a high-probability thing.”
Oracle Founder Larry Ellison, a close friend of Musk, a former Tesla board member and an investor in GPU to create the first version of Grok, but Oracle couldn’t do it to satisfy Musk.
“Boy, do they want a lot more GPUs than we give them?” Allison said. “We gave them a lot, but they wanted more and we’re giving them more.”
Oracle Chairman and Co-Founder Larry Ellison speaks at the Oracle OpenWorld 2017 conference in San Francisco, California, United States, Sunday, October 1, 2017.
David Paul Morris | David Paul Morris Bloomberg | Getty Images
While Musk and Huang have a long-standing relationship and now do more business together than ever before, the relationship hasn’t always appeared cordial.
Last June, Musk even called Nvidia Monopoly, in response to a post on X that accused Nvidia of “raising the price of GPUs” due to supply shortages.
Musk wrote that competitive chips are in development and that “Nvidia will not have a monopoly on large-scale training and inference forever.”
This statement failed to anger Huang.
Speaking in the New York Times DealBook Summit A few months later, Huang praised Musk and OpenAI for their decision to develop Nvidia’s first artificial intelligence supercomputer, the DGX system, starting in 2012.
Huang said Nvidia spent about five years perfecting and delivering the supercomputer, and he personally delivered it to Musk for use by OpenAI.
“Elon saw it and he said, ‘I want one of these’ — and he told me about OpenAI,” Huang said onstage. “That day I delivered the world’s first artificial intelligence supercomputer to OpenAI.”
A spokesman for Nvidia declined to comment. Tesla and xAI did not respond to requests for comment.
About The Author
