Elon Musk’s demand for Nvidia chips is putting pressure on the company to deliver. According to the publication, Nvidia’s sales executive told colleagues in an email that the supply chain was under strain. An NVIDIA spokesperson told BI that the company has been “working hard to respond.” all customer needs. ”
Nvidia is feeling the pressure to meet Elon Musk’s insatiable demand for chips.
In an email obtained by The Wall Street Journal, an Nvidia sales executive told colleagues that Mr. Musk’s demand for chips is straining the chip giant’s supply chain.
The Journal’s report, published Wednesday, did not say when the email was sent.
When asked for comment, an Nvidia spokesperson told Business Insider that the company has “worked hard to meet the needs of all our customers.”
Nvidia has also “significantly expanded the available supply” of its chips, the spokesperson added.
Musk did not respond to BI’s request for comment.
Nvidia’s chips have become a hot commodity among technology companies, which use them to train and deploy their AI models.
In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Verge that Meta would have more than 340,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of 2024.
“We’ve built the ability to do this at a larger scale than any other individual company, and a lot of people may not realize that,” Zuckerberg told the outlet.
Meanwhile, Musk is building his own arsenal of chips. The billionaire launched his AI startup xAI in 2023 and has since raised billions of dollars in funding.
CNBC reported in June that Musk had diverted $500 million worth of Nvidia chips from Tesla to X and xAI.
“Tesla didn’t have a place to send the Nvidia chips to power them, so they would have been sitting in warehouses,” Musk told X in response to a CNBC story.
And in September, Musk announced that xAI had brought online a massive new training cluster of Nvidia chips.
The system, called “Colossus,” was built in 122 days using 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs in Memphis, Tennessee, Musk wrote in X.
“Colossus is the world’s most powerful AI training system, and we’re doubling its size to 200,000 (50,000 H200) in the coming months,” Musk said in the post.
This feat of engineering was hailed as a “superhuman” feat by Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang.
“As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who can do that. Elon is extraordinary in his understanding of engineering and construction and organizing large systems and resources,” Huang said on the Bg2 Pod podcast. In an interview he said: It was broadcast on October 13th.
“It’s unbelievable,” Huang added.
Musk and Zuckerberg aren’t the only tech executives hungry for Nvidia chips.
Oracle co-founder and chairman Larry Ellison said during a September earnings call that he asked Huang for more GPUs during a dinner with Musk.
“You could describe this dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for a GPU,” Ellison said.
Strong demand for chips has made Nvidia one of the most valuable companies in the world.
Nvidia announced its third-quarter earnings on Nov. 20, with revenue for the quarter of $35.08 billion, an increase of 94% year-over-year. The company’s stock price has increased 173% since the beginning of the year.
