Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk has responded to an article published by CNBC that he told Nvidia to give priority to the delivery of AI chips meant for Tesla to his social media company, X.
In the article published on June 4th, CNBC cited emails from Nvidia that indicated that Musk had diverted 12,000 Nvidia H100 chips from Tesla to X.
However, Musk reacted quickly on social media, denying these allegations and saying that there was no immediate need for Tesla to have the chips, which would have otherwise just been sitting idle in one of their warehouses. He added, “The south extension of Giga Texas is almost complete. It will house 50k H100s for FSD training,” emphasizing Tesla’s efforts to expand its artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The release of the CNBC article was said to have led to a decline in Tesla share prices by about 1% early yesterday morning, thereby heightening tensions between Musk and some investors in Tesla who worry about potential conflicts of interest as well as the CEO’s capacity to manage numerous high-profile initiatives concurrently. Currently, Musk owns and operates several firms, such as Neuralink, xAI, SpaceX, among others, and X (formerly Twitter).
As a prominent figure in the artificial intelligence and brain-to-computer interface sector, his companies such as XAI and Neuralink are in direct competition with big industries such as OpenAI and Google. In 2023, X introduced the Grok chatbot to its social media platform as a counter for OpenAI’s ChatGPT which has since been made available to all paying users.Â
Lately, Neuralink was approved by the FDA for human trials where they successfully inserted a brain-to-computer interface into the first human test subject in February.
Musk, however, remains confident about Tesla despite the controversial CNBC article, saying that the company can become an AI robotics leader.
