Elon Musk has ordered thousands of Nvidia-made artificial intelligence chips destined for Tesla to be transferred to his social media company X, according to emails from the chipmaker obtained by CNBC. According to the media report, the move may delay Tesla’s plan to purchase $500 million worth of processors by several months.
Musk said Tesla should stockpile Nvidia’s H100 artificial intelligence chips to promote its transformation into “a leader in artificial intelligence and robotics.” During Tesla’s earnings call earlier this year, he said the company would increase H100 purchases from 35,000 to 85,000 units by the end of the year. Later, Musk said in a post on X that Tesla would spend $10 billion “for joint training and inference of artificial intelligence, which is mainly used in the automotive field.”
But emails from Nvidia employees obtained by CNBC show that Musk exaggerated the purchase of artificial intelligence chips for Tesla. Instead, many of those processors are now heading to X — primarily its artificial intelligence subsidiary xAI.
According to CNBC, an Nvidia memo in December said, “Elon is prioritizing deployment of X H100 GPU clusters on X rather than on Tesla, redirecting the 12,000 H100 GPUs originally provided to Tesla to X.” “In exchange, the 12,000 H100 orders originally scheduled for January and June will be reallocated to Tesla.” In a follow-up message, Nvidia employees pointed out that Musk’s announcement on the earnings call and subsequent X The remarks “conflict with the reservation.”
The move to move artificial intelligence chips from Tesla to the X is likely to anger Tesla investors, who are betting that Musk delivers on his promise of fully autonomous vehicles. The company plans to launch its first robotaxi at an event in August. Meanwhile, Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Assist features, which are cornerstones of the company’s self-driving efforts, have come under scrutiny for hundreds of crashes, dozens of which resulted in fatalities.
Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is competing with OpenAI, Google and others to develop useful applications for generative artificial intelligence and the large language models that underlie it. Last month, the company announced a $6 billion funding round, promising to deliver advanced products and the infrastructure to support them.
Nvidia has become the world’s third most valuable company thanks to demand for its GPUs, which provide a huge boost to other companies’ artificial intelligence ambitions. According to CNBC, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on an earnings call in May that with cloud computing and generative AI, customers “are consuming all existing GPUs.” The company reported revenue growth of 200% last quarter.
