Musk has to build supercomputer himself
Elon Musk's AI startup xAI will be faster than the competition. For that, he is now building the necessary supercomputer himself. A billion-dollar deal with Oracle is reportedly canceled. The tech billionaire is said to have made unrealistic demands.
A reported billion-dollar deal between Oracle and Elon Musk's AI startup xAI was canceled. Musk announced on X that they would now build a data center with 100,000 Nvidia H100 processors instead. Previously, it was reported by the medium "The Information" that the talks about the deal, with a potential value of ten billion dollars, had ended.
Oracle reportedly viewed Musk's requested construction time as unrealistic, according to multiple people involved in the negotiations. In addition, Oracle had concerns about the power supply. The business was supposed to expand an existing agreement, under which xAI rents Nvidia chips from the cloud provider for its artificial intelligence (AI).
Musk wrote on X that xAI must be faster than any other AI company to survive the competition. "If our fate depends on being the fastest, we must take the wheel instead of sitting in the back seat." An Oracle statement was not available at first.
Grok 2 successor coming soon
Currently, xAI offers the chatbot Grok, a generative AI that, fundamentally, uses the same technology as ChatGPT from Microsoft partner OpenAI. Musk announced that the successor Grok 2 had been trained with 24,000 rented H100-Chips from Oracle and was likely to be released publicly in the coming month.
The new system with 100,000 pieces of the H100 chip will be "the most powerful training cluster in the world," Musk wrote further. The chip is Nvidia's flagship and comes from 2022. In particular with it, the US company achieved a market share of 80% in the past year.
Elon Musk's investors are excited about the advancements in xAI's AI technology, as it aims to surpass the competition. Oracle, previously interested in a billion-dollar deal with xAI, had concerns about the requested construction time and power supply for Musk's supercomputer.
