The magnate Elon Musk asked the microchip manufacturer Nvidia to prioritize the shipment of components originally designed for Tesla to his social network X, formerly known as Twitter, and to his technological startup xAI, which resulted in production delays due to the lack of materials valued at over 500 million dollars (459.4 million euros), as revealed by CNBC.
According to Nvidia’s emails accessed by the American media and collected by Europa Press, the billionaire redirected around 12,000 H100 GPU clusters from Tesla to X in December 2023, which also supports xAI data centers.
Meanwhile, X’s order for the same quantity and product that was to be delivered in January and June of this year, was assigned to Tesla.
With the exchange, Musk delayed the receipt of over 500 million dollars in graphics processing units (GPUs) at Tesla for months, which could worsen the accumulated delays in the installation of supercomputers that Tesla claims to need for its autonomous vehicles and anthropomorphic robots.
Later, another late April email stated that Musk’s comment during Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call about the purchase of Nvidia semiconductors could represent a “discrepancy with [orders placed].”
Additionally, a tweet from the entrepreneur about the AI spending Tesla would make in 2024, which Musk quantified at 10 billion dollars (9.187 billion euros) “would conflict with orders and forecasts for fiscal year 2025”.
