Elon Musk Diverted Thousands of NVIDIA GPUs From Tesla to X. His Argument: They Would Have Collected Dust at Tesla

Tesla CEO and current X owner Elon Musk has been talking for months about how his companies will invest massive amounts of money to get tens of thousands of GPUs from NVIDIA. The goal is to power his artificial intelligence systems in xAI and his planned autonomous cars. However, how Musk will divide those resources is currently up for debate.

Tesla and its multi-billion investment in AI. During an earnings call with investors in April, Musk indicated that Tesla would increase the number of NVIDIA H100 GPUs it uses for development. By the end of the year, the automaker plans to increase its stock of GPUs from 35,000 to 85,000 and invest about $10 billion in AI, both in inference and training.

Send the GPUs to X, not Tesla. As CNBC reports, several leaked NVIDIA emails show that Musk’s statements to investors were “exaggerated.” These emails indicate that Musk diverted a significant portion of the GPUs theoretically destined for Tesla to Twitter (now X).

Autonomous car delay. According to leaked information, Musk redirected some $500 million in GPUs to X, which could lead to months of delays in developing the autonomous driving systems he has been pushing for years at Tesla.

The AI cluster will go to X first. An internal NVIDIA message from December states: “Elon prioritizing X H100 GPU cluster deployment at X versus Tesla by redirecting 12k of shipped H100 GPUs originally slated for Tesla to X instead. In exchange, original X orders of 12k H100 slated for Jan and June to be redirected to Tesla.”

They were going to gather dust, anyway. Musk said his redirection of NVIDIA GPUs was logical because “Tesla had no place to ship them and power them up, so they were just going to sit in a warehouse” with no use. He added that the expansion of the Gigafactory in Texas is almost complete and will house 50,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs for training its autonomous driving system.

NVIDIA is confused. A subsequent NVIDIA email from late April reveals that Musk’s statements to investors are “inconsistent with bookings” and that the $10 billion he was talking about is also “inconsistent with bookings and guidance for fiscal year 2025.”

Is Musk neglecting Tesla? Criticism of Musk’s management of Tesla, which isn’t having its best moment, has been circulating for some time. Some claim that the company needs a “full-time CEO.” The truth is that Musk has to divide his time between his multiple projects at electric car maker, X and xAI (closely related), and others such as Neuralink.

Now, neither Grok nor FSD are working very well. Musk’s efforts at his companies aren’t yielding particularly remarkable results. His Grok chatbot, available to X Premium subscribers, is famous for its sarcastic responses but not for being superior to others like ChatGPT. Meanwhile, Tesla’s autonomous driving system continues to cause a lot trouble and confusion, potentially endangering some users.

Image | UK Government

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