Musk’s huge demand for AI chips is impacting the supply chain of global chip giant Nvidia. Musk and his company, xAI, have seen staggering demand for Nvidia's H100 and H200 chips to support its new supercomputer Colossus, even leading Nvidia's head of sales to send out internal emails reflecting supply chain pressures. The editor of Downcodes will take you to understand the details behind this incident and its impact on the future development of the field of artificial intelligence.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is going all-out in pursuit of artificial intelligence chips to power his new supercomputer, a move that has stretched Nvidia's production capabilities to the limit.
According to the Wall Street Journal, an Nvidia sales leader said in an internal email that Musk's demand for its chips is putting pressure on the company's supply chain. "We work hard to meet the needs of all our customers and have significantly increased the supply currently available," an Nvidia spokesperson said.
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Musk announced in September that his artificial intelligence startup xAI had brought its training cluster called "Colossus" online in just 122 days. Colossus is billed as "the world's most powerful AI training system", with 100,000 NVIDIA H100 training chips at its core. Musk also said that the cluster will double in size to 200,000 chips in the coming months, including 50,000 more powerful H200 units.
Currently, AI competitors such as OpenAI and Meta also have hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA chips, but Colossus has the largest number of processors in a single AI computing cluster in the world. In September, Oracle founder Larry Ellison mentioned at an investor event that he and Musk "begged" Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for more AI chips at a dinner.
Ellison said humorously when talking about the matter: "Please take our money. No, no, take more money. We need more of your chips." In the end, their efforts seemed to be paying off. .
xAI’s supercomputers 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 received US$6 billion in financing from heavyweight investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. This round of financing brought xAI’s valuation to US$24 billion. Recent reports indicate that xAI plans to raise another US$6 billion and its valuation will reach US$50 billion.
Musk’s huge demand for AI chips not only reflects xAI’s ambitions for the development of AI technology, but also heralds the continued growth in demand for computing power in the field of artificial intelligence in the future, which will further promote the innovation and development of chip technology and have a positive impact on the entire The technology industry has had a profound impact.