Elon Musk says SpaceX will exclusively use Nvidia GPUs 'because they are the best' — says optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 will be launched into space next year
No to AMD, Cerebras, D-Matrix, Rebellions, SambaNova, and Tenstorrent?
Elon Musk on Tuesday said in an X post that SpaceX and xAI will exclusively use Nvidia GPUs because 'they are the best.' He later clarified during SpaceX's earnings call that Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 rack-scale system's design is above everything else that is available today, which is certainly praise for Nvidia, but not such a good sign for other developers of merchant AI accelerators.
SpaceX has committed to using Nvidia GPUs exclusively because they are the bestAugust 4, 2026
"Going forward, we have decided to build exclusively on Nvidia, because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture," Elon Musk said during SpaceX's earnings call. "We think it is the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia. We are exclusive to Nvidia. […] We think the design of the NVL72 VR[200] computer is a much better design than, say, having a standard rack style design."
Historically, xAI has exclusively used Nvidia's Hopper and, more recently, Blackwell hardware to train multiple generations of Grok. Although AMD has used Grok-1 on its Instinct MI300X accelerators, there has never been a public announcement or credible evidence that xAI has evaluated or used AMD Instinct, or other non-Nvidia accelerators in production. xAI's Colossus supercomputers have been using Nvidia's accelerators for years, so the official exclusivity looks more like a formality that gives a strong testament for Nvidia rather than a decision that was hard to make.
When it comes to the praise of the cable-less design of compute trays in Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 VR200 rack system, then Musk's admiration of this architecture is understandable, as while expensive, such trays greatly improve serviceability, assembly speed, and reliability by eliminating a large number of manual cable and hose connections that are common sources of installation errors and failures.
Interestingly, but Musk's SpaceX plans to deploy Vera Rubin not only in its own and xAI's data centers, but also in space.
"With respect to the Starmind AI satellite, which will be essentially an optimized Vera Rubin NVL72 computer, this is not some sort of far future distant thing; we expect to start launching this next year," Musk said. "We think the design of the NVL72 VR[200] computer is a much better design than, say, having a standard rack style design. We expect to actually deploy this on the ground as well as in orbit, because we think it is going to be a radical simplification of the normal NVL72 rack."
Deploying an NVL72-scale machine will be by far a more ambitious project than Nvidia has in mind with its Space-1 Vera Rubin Module that is designed to deploy several, perhaps a dozen, of Rubin AI accelerators in space. 36 Vera CPUs and 72 Rubin AI GPUs offer rather formidable performance, though many questions remain about the cooling and reliability of such racks in space.
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Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.
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timsSOFTWARE There's no reason/advantage in saying something like that unless they made some kind of deal behind the scenes. We'll probably hear about some kind of deal they cut in the coming weeks.Reply -
SonoraTechnical Reply
Meh, Jensen had his personal tailor make a leather jacket for Musk...timsSOFTWARE said:There's no reason/advantage in saying something like that unless they made some kind of deal behind the scenes. We'll probably hear about some kind of deal they cut in the coming weeks. -
DS426 ReplyWe think the design of the NVL72 VR computer is a much better design than, say, having a standard rack style design."
Ever heard of AMD Helios?
nVidia is just their wet dream of a company -- the everything "Super" company. Funny that Anthropic and OpenAI consistently have better models than SpaceXAI, even though they use AMD hardware (even if mostly CPU's and not GPU's). Better tools and a better ecosystem for business users as well. -
derekullo ReplytimsSOFTWARE said:There's no reason/advantage in saying something like that unless they made some kind of deal behind the scenes. We'll probably hear about some kind of deal they cut in the coming weeks.
If your goal is AI Slop / Megawatt then Nvidia is #1 -
timsSOFTWARE Replyderekullo said:If your goal is AI Slop / Megawatt then Nvidia is #1
Even if you think it's true, you can only hurt your negotiating position when trying to buy in bulk by making a statement like that - unless you've already signed the deal, and maybe part of the agreement is that you publicly announce that you're going to be using that vendor exclusively.
Otherwise, you'd think you'd want to keep an opinion like that to yourself, and at least give the impression you'd consider alternatives when trying to get good pricing on that big order. -
derekullo Reply
Nvidia having the most powerful and most efficient GPUs isn't a secret.timsSOFTWARE said:Even if you think it's true, you can only hurt your negotiating position when trying to buy in bulk by making a statement like that - unless you've already signed the deal, and maybe part of the agreement is that you publicly announce that you're going to be using that vendor exclusively.
Otherwise, you'd think you'd want to keep an opinion like that to yourself, and at least give the impression you'd consider alternatives when trying to get good pricing on that big order.
Nvidia knows that Elon knows that it isn't a secret!
Elon also likes to troll and stir the pot!