Elon Musk negotiates with Nvidia for artificial intelligence

The chip giant may invest in xAI. The American start-up is valued at over €35 billion.

Photo by: InsideEVs

By: Francesco Barontini

Nov 6, 2024 at 4:49am ET

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A recent report claims that Elon Musk is in talks with Nvidia. The American chip giant is interested in investing in xAI. This is according to the New York Post, which claims to have been contacted by a person involved in the matter.

Nvidia has refused to comment on the matter, but it is true that its CEO Jensen Huang pays a great deal of attention to the field of artificial intelligence and has invested in numerous companies dealing with this branch of computing, given its enormous potential.

Great mutual respect

xAI was born after other artificial intelligence giants such as Open AI, which brought the famous ChatGPT software to the market, but it proved capable of developing its Grok software in record time. Drawing on the Tesla experience of many of its programmers and engineers, the xAI team created a supercomputer cluster with 100,000 Blackwell H200 GPUs in just 19 days.

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According to Huang, a project like this takes at least four years, from conception to final production.

"As far as I know," said the Nvidia CEO, "there is only one person in the world who can do something like this in such a short time. Elon is unique in his understanding of engineering, large systems, resource management - it's just incredible."

A rapidly expanding reality

Nvidia aside, xAI is receiving funding from multiple sources. A Wall Street Journal report claims that the start-up, which has reached a valuation of $40 billion (£30 billion), is currently in talks to receive several billion more from certain investors.

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The report indicates that firms such as Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and Vy Capital could deposit a further $5 billion (more than £3.8 billion) in xAI's coffers.

The fact is that xAI develops artificial intelligence that is used by SpaceX and Tesla, and that it is precisely by exploiting the vast amount of data from projects carried out by Musk's other companies that it has developed self-learning methods that can produce excellent results in a short space of time.