Tesla CEO Elon Musk is fully committed to pursuing artificial intelligence chips to support his new supercomputer, a move that has pushed Nvidia's production capacity to its limits.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, a sales executive at Nvidia stated in an internal email that Musk's demand for its chips is putting pressure on the company's supply chain. A spokesperson for Nvidia said, "We are working hard to meet all customer demands and have significantly increased the available supply."
Image Source Note: Image generated by AI, image authorized by service provider Midjourney
Musk announced in September that his AI startup xAI has launched its training cluster named "Colossus" in just 122 days. Colossus claims to be "the world's most powerful AI training system," with its core consisting of 100,000 Nvidia H100 training chips. Musk also stated that in the coming months, the cluster's size will double to 200,000 chips, including 50,000 more powerful H200 units.
Currently, AI competitors like OpenAI and Meta also have hundreds of thousands of Nvidia chips, but Colossus has the highest number of processors in a single AI computing cluster worldwide. In September, Oracle founder Larry Ellison mentioned at an investor event that he and Musk "pleaded" with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for more AI chips during a dinner.
Ellison humorously remarked on the matter, saying, "Please take our money. No, no, take more money. We need more of your chips." Ultimately, their efforts seem to have paid off.
xAI's supercomputer will be used to train its next-generation large language model, Grok, which aims to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4. In May of this year, xAI secured $6 billion in funding from heavyweight investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, bringing xAI's valuation to $24 billion. Recently, reports have indicated that xAI plans to raise another $6 billion, with a valuation reaching $50 billion.
Key Points:
🌟 Musk's xAI supercomputer Colossus uses 100,000 Nvidia H100 chips, claiming to be the world's most powerful AI training system.
💰 Musk and Oracle founder Ellison sought more chips from Nvidia during a dinner, and their efforts seem to have made progress.
🚀 xAI has raised over $6 billion in funding, aiming to launch the large language model Grok to compete with OpenAI's GPT-4.
