Tesla CEO Elon Musk has instructed Nvidia to prioritize shipments of AI processors to its X and xAI companies over the electric car maker. CNBC reported: on tuesday.
The news suggests Musk is prioritizing artificial intelligence-related developments outside Tesla and comes ahead of a key shareholder vote on his compensation package at the company.
“Elon prioritized the deployment of X’s H100 GPU cluster rather than Tesla by redirecting 12,000 of the shipped H100 GPUs originally destined for Tesla to X,” an internal Nvidia memo from December read, according to a CNBC report.
“Instead, the original X orders for the 12K H100 scheduled for January and June will be forwarded to Tesla,” the memo said.
The change will delay Tesla’s receipt of more than $500 million in processors by several months, according to CNBC.
in post As for the X, Musk said Tesla doesn’t have anywhere to store and run Nvidia’s processors, adding that plans to expand the Gigafactory in Texas are nearly complete: “It will house 50,000 H100s for FSD (fully self-driving) training.”
Earlier this year, he announced that Tesla would spend $10 billion on AI this year, as part of an effort to increase the number of cutting-edge Nvidia chips it uses and to drive development of its FSD software and robotics.
The billionaire is also developing AI for applications such as the chatbot Grok with X and xAI. XAI, which Musk launched in 2023 to take on ChatGPT’s creator OpenAI, raised $6 billion in funding last month.
Tesla shareholders are scheduled to vote on June 13 on Musk’s compensation package, which would be the largest for a US corporate CEO.
in Discussion about X Regarding compensation, Musk said: “I’m not comfortable growing Tesla into a leader in AI and robotics without having roughly 25% voting control. Unless that happens, I’d rather develop products outside of Tesla.”
Tesla, which did not respond to a request for comment, is battling a slowing EV market and announced job cuts of more than 10% worldwide in April.
Nvidia declined to comment.
Tesla shares fell less than 1%.
