Elon Musk wants to purchase 300,000 Blackwell B200 Nvidia AI GPUs — Hardware upgrades to improve X's Grok AI bot
Nvidia's B200 GPUs will be used to boost the X platform's AI capabilities
AI GPU development is running at breakneck speeds, and Elon Musk wants to be at the forefront of the revolution. In an X post, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO revealed that he wants to buy 300,000 worth of Nvidia's latest Blackwell B200 GPUs by next summer. The new GPUs will upgrade X's existing AI GPU cluster, which currently consists of 100,000 previous-generation H100 GPUs.
100,000 H100 GPUs is already an enormous amount of computing power, but Elon states that given the pace of AI GPU development, it's not worth keeping around X's massive array of H100 GPUs for long, mainly due to its energy consumption of 1 gigawatt.
Given the pace of technology improvement, it’s not worth sinking 1GW of power into H100s.The @xAI 100k H100 liquid-cooled training cluster will be online in a few months. Next big step would probably be ~300k B200s with CX8 networking next summer.June 2, 2024
X uses the massive array of AI GPUs for Grok, an AI bot. The AI was developed on a homebrewed language dubbed Grok-1 that is geared to provide less straightforward answers as well as witty/comedic answers compared to ChatGPT/Copilot and Gemini. Basically, it is trying to take the "robot" aspect out of the AI bot. The new AI bot is available to X users right now; however, you'll need to be an X Premium user to gain access to the AI bot.
Musk's logic has merit. The AI GPU development race is one of the most heated races we've seen in years in the technological industry, rivaling the CPU development wars we had in the 1990s and 2000s. Nvidia's new Blackwell B200 is a massive upgrade over the H100, offering four times the training performance and 30 times the inference performance.
Technically, the B200 does consume more power. However, the B200's colossal performance improvements mean the chip runs significantly more efficiently than the H100. In Musk's case, trading 100,000 H100s for three times more GPUs that consume even more power is still a net win due to the GPUs' incredible amount of additional AI performance.
It'll be interesting to see when Musk does get his hands on all 300,000 B200 GPUs. If Nvidia's H100 has taught us anything, it's that its AI GPU demand always outstrips actual supply. We will probably see a repeat of 2023, when all the big AI customers, including X, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, are fighting to grab as many B200s as Nvidia can pump out for at least the next several months.
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Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.
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DavidMV That's about $10 billion in GPUs alone and about a half billion dollars in electricity per year. Can X really afford that? How will they make enough money from Grok to cover that? AI bubble...Reply -
CmdrShepard Reply
You see, the title says "Elon Musk wants to ..." -- I want to bang a different supermodel every day, but that doesn't mean I can actually go through with it. Same for Elon. If wishes were horses and all that.DavidMV said:That's about $10 billion in GPUs alone and about a half billion dollars in electricity per year. Can X really afford that? How will they make enough money from Grok to cover that? AI bubble... -
Notton Twitter, I mean, X, is only worth $4~19 billion and elon is using it to prop up Tesla and SpaceX.Reply
Is elon going to pay up front? because Jensen is smart and I doubt he would be conned into giving away free GPUs. -
8086 Reply
Elon Musk has some wiggle room to negotiate with nVIDIA, as the margins on the b200 are projected at 80-85%. AMD has it's own line of Instinct AI and that can be used as negotiating leverage against team green.DavidMV said:That's about $10 billion in GPUs alone and about a half billion dollars in electricity per year. Can X really afford that? How will they make enough money from Grok to cover that? AI bubble...
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-news-nvidias-b200-price-could-reach-40000-85-profit-bzbme/ -
derekullo As long as the board on each company approves of it, Elon can make any deal shuffling money around that he wants.Reply
Maybe X leases the graphic cards from SpaceX at an absurdly low rate ... -
genz If Elon is ordering now, he might get them in about 2 years.Reply
Trust me, the waiting line for B200s is that long. -
jlake3 Reply
Even if he negotiates a great deal and gets the $10B list price down to somewhere in the range of... I dunno... $3-5 billion, there's still the question of where Twitter/X gets that kind of money from, and how they afford the ongoing costs to run them. Last I heard revenue was down 50% or more from before Elon bought it while the interest payments were costing them over a billion dollars a year, and it was believed that they've not been profitable at any point under his management. Supposedly the banks Twitter owes money to value the company at about a third of what he paid for it, plus he's already tried to cut costs by stiffing landlords, vendors, and staff, so I'm not sure they've got cash-on-hand to pay up front or the creditwortiness to get a multi-billion dollar loan on favorable terms.8086 said:Elon Musk has some wiggle room to negotiate with nVIDIA, as the margins on the b200 are projected at 80-85%. AMD has it's own line of Instinct AI and that can be used as negotiating leverage against team green.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/tech-news-nvidias-b200-price-could-reach-40000-85-profit-bzbme/ -
Tonet666 Reply
:tearsofjoy::tearsofjoy:CmdrShepard said:You see, the title says "Elon Musk wants to ..." -- I want to bang a different supermodel every day, but that doesn't mean I can actually go through with it. Same for Elon. If wishes were horses and all that. -
Co BIY If I wanted to chase the AI bubble I would rather bet on Elon rather than Sam Altman.Reply
Nvidia is the clear front runner but possibly overvalued.
The money chasing AI has to go somewhere. -
JRStern Reply
And once you have the chips you still have to mount them in the proper rack and server boxes and data storage, and hire about 10,000 man-years of tuning, so call that $30b before it says "hello world".DavidMV said:That's about $10 billion in GPUs alone and about a half billion dollars in electricity per year. Can X really afford that? How will they make enough money from Grok to cover that? AI bubble...
Or $60b if he shoots it to Mars first.