Billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk has told investors he plans to build a supercomputer dubbed “gigafactory of compute” to support the development of his artificial intelligence (AI) start-up xAI, an industry news outlet reported on Saturday.
The Tesla Inc CEO wants the supercomputer — which would string together 100,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPU) — to be operational by fall next year, and he “will hold himself personally responsible for delivering it on time,” The Information said.
Nvidia’s H100 family of powerful GPUs dominate the data center chip market for AI, but can be hard to obtain due to high demand.
Photo: Bloomberg
The planned supercomputer would be “at least four times the size of the biggest GPU clusters that exist today,” such as those used by Meta Platforms Inc to train its AI models, Musk was quoted as saying during a presentation to investors this month.
Since OpenAI’s generative AI tool ChatGPT exploded on the scene in 2022, the technology has been an area of fierce competition between tech giants Microsoft Corp and Google Inc, as well as Meta and start-ups like Anthropic and Stability AI Inc.
Musk is one of the world’s few investors with deep enough pockets to compete with OpenAI, Google or Meta on AI.
His company xAI is developing a chatbot named Grok, which can access social media platform X, also owned by Musk, in real time.
Earlier this year, Musk said training the Grok 2 model took about 20,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, adding that the Grok 3 model and beyond would require 100,000 Nvidia H100 units.
In related news, Tesla shareholders are being urged by a major proxy advisory firm to reject a proposed US$56 billion pay package for Musk, in a blow to the electric-vehicle manufacturer’s board.
Glass Lewis & Co made its recommendation in a report released on Saturday, citing the “excessive size” of the pay deal and the dilutive effect upon exercise.
“Mr. Musk’s slate of extraordinarily time-consuming projects unrelated to the company was well-documented before the 2018 grant, and only expanded with his high-profile purchase of the company now known as X,” Glass Lewis said.
The recommendation to large institutional investors might sway their vote over Musk’s pay at the vehicle manufacturer’s annual meeting on June 13. If the proposal is rejected, the CEO might make good on threats to develop products outside of Tesla.
Next month’s vote would be the second time Musk’s pay package has been put before shareholders. The remuneration deal was originally crafted in 2018, but earlier this year a Delaware judge voided it, saying investors were not fully informed of key details.
If Tesla’s board can show the compensation deal still has broad support, it might help with a legal appeal of the ruling. On the other hand, a loss would be a major embarrassment and demonstrate that investors are losing faith in Musk’s leadership. The vote is only advisory, meaning Tesla can choose to ignore it.
Additional reporting by Bloomberg
‘SWASTICAR’: Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s close association with Donald Trump has prompted opponents to brand him a ‘Nazi’ and resulted in a dramatic drop in sales Demonstrators descended on Tesla Inc dealerships across the US, and in Europe and Canada on Saturday to protest company chief Elon Musk, who has amassed extraordinary power as a top adviser to US President Donald Trump. Waving signs with messages such as “Musk is stealing our money” and “Reclaim our country,” the protests largely took place peacefully following fiery episodes of vandalism on Tesla vehicles, dealerships and other facilities in recent weeks that US officials have denounced as terrorism. Hundreds rallied on Saturday outside the Tesla dealership in Manhattan. Some blasted Musk, the world’s richest man, while others demanded the shuttering of his
TIGHT-LIPPED: UMC said it had no merger plans at the moment, after Nikkei Asia reported that the firm and GlobalFoundries were considering restarting merger talks United Microelectronics Corp (UMC, 聯電), the world’s No. 4 contract chipmaker, yesterday launched a new US$5 billion 12-inch chip factory in Singapore as part of its latest effort to diversify its manufacturing footprint amid growing geopolitical risks. The new factory, adjacent to UMC’s existing Singapore fab in the Pasir Res Wafer Fab Park, is scheduled to enter volume production next year, utilizing mature 22-nanometer and 28-nanometer process technologies, UMC said in a statement. The company plans to invest US$5 billion during the first phase of the new fab, which would have an installed capacity of 30,000 12-inch wafers per month, it said. The
MULTIFACETED: A task force has analyzed possible scenarios and created responses to assist domestic industries in dealing with US tariffs, the economics minister said The Executive Yuan is tomorrow to announce countermeasures to US President Donald Trump’s planned reciprocal tariffs, although the details of the plan would not be made public until Monday next week, Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) said yesterday. The Cabinet established an economic and trade task force in November last year to deal with US trade and tariff related issues, Kuo told reporters outside the legislature in Taipei. The task force has been analyzing and evaluating all kinds of scenarios to identify suitable responses and determine how best to assist domestic industries in managing the effects of Trump’s tariffs, he
Taiwan’s official purchasing managers’ index (PMI) last month rose 0.2 percentage points to 54.2, in a second consecutive month of expansion, thanks to front-loading demand intended to avoid potential US tariff hikes, the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) said yesterday. While short-term demand appeared robust, uncertainties rose due to US President Donald Trump’s unpredictable trade policy, CIER president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) told a news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s economy this year would be characterized by high-level fluctuations and the volatility would be wilder than most expect, Lien said Demand for electronics, particularly semiconductors, continues to benefit from US technology giants’ effort
RSS