Elon Musk has a lot on his plate these days: Running a publicly traded EV car company, rebranding one of the internet’s biggest social media platforms as “X,” and launching satellites into space.
According to a new report from The Information, Musk is about to split his time with yet another major project: an xAI supercomputer, which he has been calling a “gigafactory of compute.”
This new report comes from an investor presentation Musk has been using in order to raise money for his AI company, xAI.
Last month, both TechCrunch and The Information reported on a previous xAI fundraising presentation for investors, where the company was looking for $6 billion on an $18 billion valuation, and was reportedly close to getting it.
xAI’s gigafactory of compute
The latest xAI investor presentation provides new details of an xAI supercomputer. Musk says he needs this supercomputer to run and train the next version of xAI’s Grok, best known as the AI chatbot currently integrated into X, the former Twitter. To power this project, Musk is looking to connect 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs – around four times the size of the current biggest GPU cluster.
Musk said earlier this year that the latest Grok 2 model was trained used 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. He’s now looking to increase that by 5 times as many chips in order to train Grok 3.
xAI would likely partner with Oracle for this endeavor. The Information reported earlier this month that Musk’s AI company was closing on a $10 billion deal with the company to rent its AI servers.
In a quarterly earnings call late last year, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison told investors that it had worked with Musk to train its Grok model, but xAI originally wanted more Nvidia GPUs than Oracle was able to provide for them.
Musk’s AI obsession
Musk’s most recent shiny new thing has been AI. Musk has been enamored with the much-hypep tech industry trend, especially since OpenAI, a company he helped found but is no longer involved with, suddenly ascended to the upper echelon of big tech companies.
In July 2023, Musk unveiled his own AI company, xAI, in order to join the AI arms race.
xAI’s first product, an AI chatbot named Grok that is integrated into Musk’s social media platform X, was launched late last year.
However, things haven’t gone so smoothly with Grok. Last month, X launched a new feature powered by Grok that provided context for trending topics on the platform. This has resulted in Grok spreading misinformation and creating fake headlines based on X users’ fake news posts and satirical, joke comments.
Furthermore, Musk’s new obsession with AI can’t be all good news for Tesla investors looking for a CEO to focus on the EV company’s problems. Tesla has been struggling in recent months due to declining car sales and has recently had to lay off thousands of employees. In addition, Tesla’s latest EV model, the Cybertruck, had to go through a recall last month after reports of the acceleration pedal getting stuck due to the car’s design.
If Musk’s supercomputer pans out, a success could help relieve some of the weight of his current problems. Musk is reportedly hoping to have the supercomputer up and running by fall of 2025, so maybe we will soon find out.
