In November 2023, at an all-hands assembly with staff, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was requested whether or not the corporate would observe the lead of Apple and Disney and droop its promoting on X on account of rising ranges of antisemitism and different hate speech on the platform.

X proprietor Elon Musk stated earlier that month that he agreed with a submit on the positioning that accused “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred towards whites.” Quite a few manufacturers — Disney and Apple amongst them — moved rapidly to pause their advert campaigns.

Huang’s response was agency however diplomatic, in line with individuals who have been listening to the assembly however requested to not be named as a result of they weren’t approved to talk to the press. He stated the chipmaker hadn’t marketed on X in a really very long time and had no plans to take action. Nonetheless, Huang additionally emphasised that Nvidia would by no means make public statements towards one other enterprise.

Ignored of Huang’s commentary on the time was any element concerning Nvidia’s rising coziness with Musk’s enterprise empire.

Nvidia is seeing hovering demand for its graphics processing models (GPUs) and associated {hardware} and companies, a increase that is lifted the corporate’s market cap properly previous $2 trillion. Nvidia’s merchandise, together with new accelerator chips, present computing energy for generative synthetic intelligence workloads, robotics, analysis and knowledge heart initiatives.

Income within the newest quarter jumped a whopping 265% to $22.1 billion, and final yr Nvidia surpassed Intel in complete gross sales.

Musk has made guarantees that his corporations will develop refined AI merchandise, and doing so requires shopping for up a whole lot of Nvidia’s expertise.

Their cozy relationship was on show this week at Nvidia’s annual GTC convention in San Jose, California. The occasion, which attracted roughly 16,000 attendees together with celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Kendrick Lamar, had two classes that includes leaders of xAI, the startup Musk formally revealed in July 2023.

Christian Szegedy, a co-founder and analysis scientist at xAI who beforehand labored at Google, spoke at a fireplace chat with Bojan Tunguz, an information scientist at Nvidia. One other co-founder and analysis engineer from xAI, Igor Babuschkin, a veteran of OpenAI and Google, gave an outline of how Musk’s startup is utilizing Nvidia GPUs to assist “speed up coaching and inference of their Grok mannequin,” referring to the startup’s AI chatbot.

In Nvidia’s press launch on Monday saying the launch of its Blackwell AI chips, Musk was quoted saying, “There’s at present nothing higher than NVIDIA {hardware} for AI.”

Musk, who helped create OpenAI earlier than a public cut up with CEO Sam Altman and different founders, launched xAI to develop AI fashions and software program merchandise.

In the meantime, his electrical automobile maker Tesla has spent years engaged on AI software program to show its automobiles into autonomous automobiles. It is also now growing the Tesla Bot, or Optimus, a humanoid robotic.

Whereas the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s income comes from its automotive enterprise, Musk usually encourages shareholders to think about it in another way. In January he stated, in a submit on X, “Tesla is an AI/robotics firm that seems to many to be a automotive firm.”

Tesla first mentioned plans to construct a “Dojo supercomputer” at an AI Day presentation in August 2021. The intention for Dojo was to course of and practice AI fashions with big quantities of video and knowledge captured by Tesla automobiles.

Nvidia is on the coronary heart of its AI efforts. Final August, former Tesla AI engineer Tim Zaman posted on X {that a} Tesla AI cluster, constructed utilizing 10,000 of Nvidia’s H100 chips, was able to go stay.

Musk stated a submit on X in January that whereas a Dojo supercomputer price $500 million to construct, “Tesla will spend greater than that on Nvidia {hardware} this yr.” He added, “The desk stakes for being aggressive in AI are at the least a number of billion {dollars} per yr at this level.”

And on Tesla’s fourth-quarter earnings name in January, an analyst requested Tesla executives to offer an replace on Dojo, and whether or not the corporate had a “adequate provide of Nvidia GPUs wanted for the coaching of the system.”

Musk stated Tesla was “pursuing the twin path of Nvidia and Dojo,” seemingly implying that it is constructing Dojo with out Nvidia’s expertise however utilizing it elsewhere. Musk described Dojo as “an extended shot value taking as a result of the payoff is doubtlessly very excessive. But it surely’s not one thing that may be a excessive likelihood.”

Oracle founder Larry Ellison, an in depth pal of Musk’s, former Tesla board member and investor in X, stated in December on his firm’s earnings name that xAI had secured Nvidia GPUs by means of Oracle to create the primary model of Grok, however that Oracle wasn’t in a position to meet Musk’s calls for.

“Boy, do they need much more GPUs than we gave them,” Ellison stated. “We gave them fairly a number of, however they needed extra and we’re within the strategy of getting them extra.”

Whereas Musk and Huang have a longstanding connection and at the moment are doing extra enterprise collectively than ever, the connection hasn’t all the time appeared pleasant.

Final June, Musk went as far as to name Nvidia monopolistic, in response to a submit on X that accused Nvidia of “spiking the value” of its GPUs, which it might do due to the provision scarcity.

Musk wrote that aggressive chips have been in growth, and that “Nvidia won’t have a monopoly on large-scale coaching & inference without end.”

The remarks failed to impress Huang.

Talking at The New York Occasions’ DealBook summit a number of months later, Huang credited Musk and OpenAI for the choice to develop Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer, the DGX system, beginning again in 2012.

Huang stated it took Nvidia about 5 years to good and ship the supercomputer, which he personally delivered to Musk to be used by OpenAI.

“Elon noticed it, and he goes, ‘I would like a type of’ — he informed me about OpenAI,” Huang stated on stage. “I delivered the world’s first AI supercomputer to OpenAI on that day.”

A spokesperson for Nvidia declined to remark. Tesla and xAI did not reply to requests for remark.

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