Despite his tendency to play against his tech rivals, even Elon Musk is hungry for tech’s hottest chips from Nvidia.
During the chipmaker’s annual GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California this week, two xAI co-founders — the AI company Musk founded as a rival to OpenAI — held sessions at the so-called Woodstock of AI.
xAI co-founder Igor Babuschkin led a talk Tuesday about how the company is using Nvidia’s GPUs, along with machine learning framework JAX, to train its chatbot, Grok. That same day Christian Szegedy, another xAI co-founder and research scientist, held a fireside chat with Nvidia data scientist Bojan Tunguz to talk software synthesis and verification, LLM alignment, and Grok’s fun mode.
Even if he wasn’t onstage, Musk’s words made it into the conference, too: The CEO was quoted in an official release for Nvidia’s new Blackwell chips. “There is currently nothing better than Nvidia hardware for AI,” he says in the statement. Nvidia, Tesla, nor xAI immediately responded to a request for comment.
Musk’s Tesla, which he’s referred to as “an AI/robotics company that appears to many to be a car company,” has relied on Nvidia-powered supercomputers to produce its electric vehicles — at least until last July, when Musk said during Tesla’s earnings presentation that the EV maker would work on building its own $1 billion supercomputer named Dojo. In January, Musk tweeted that the supercomputer would take $500 million to build — but that expense was a drop in the bucket compared to how much Tesla is spending on Nvidia hardware. “Table stakes for being competitive in AI are at least several billion dollars per year at this point,” he wrote.
Despite the fact that he’s a Nvidia customer, Musk has also criticized the chipmaker — and suggested that competition is coming. Nvidia “will not have a monopoly on large-scale training & inference forever,” he wrote on X last June.
Nvidia already has the world’s top tech companies queuing up for its new Blackwell chip. Microsoft and Meta, two of its biggest customers, have already announced they’ve placed orders. Thanks to the chipmaker’s pre-Blackwell chip — the H100, also known as the Hopper — Nvidia become the first semiconductor company to reach a $2 trillion market cap in February, and reigns as one of the world’s most valuable companies. Nvidia beat Wall Street’s expectations in its fourth-quarter earnings, reporting revenues of $22 billion — up almost 270% from the previous year.