Elon Musk would spend $10 billion on artificial intelligence this year

Between Tesla and xAI, the pursuit of artificial intelligence Elon Musk It cost about $10 billion to implement online learning and computing capabilities this year, according to a post Thursday on X (formerly Twitter) by Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt.

“Tesla has already deployed and is ahead of schedule in training on a 29,000 unit Nvidia H100 cluster at Giga Texas and will have 50,000 H100 capacity by the end of October, with ~85,000 H100 equivalent capacity by December,” Merritt. marked. .

By the end of this year, Elon Musk’s companies (Tesla and xAI) will bring about $10 billion worth of educational computing power online in 2024 alone.

Tesla has already deployed and is running training ahead of schedule on a 29,000 unit Nvidia H100 cluster at Giga Texas – and will… pic.twitter.com/UgvmsBLuQp

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 29, 2024

In August, Tesla also unveiled its Cortex AI cluster, which will be used to train the company’s full self-driving system and uses 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs along with another 20,000 Dojo AI chips developed by Tesla itself. The Colossus supercomputer, which Tesla unveiled in September, uses as many H100 GPUs as Memphis, and plans to expand it with another 50,000 H100 GPUs and 50,000 H200 GPUs in the coming months.

xAI, on the other hand, began building its Memphis supercomputer in July at its Gigafactory of Compute, located at a former Electrolux manufacturing facility in Memphis, Tennessee. Musk claims Memphis is “the most powerful artificial intelligence training cluster in the world” as it runs on 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, with which Musk has promised to double that capacity in a short time. It went into production in September and has since been tasked with creating “the most powerful AI in the world by any measure by December of this year”, most likely Grok 3. xAI has not revealed how much it will cost to create “Memphis”, although , Tom’s Hardware estimates that the company has spent at least $2 billion on GPUs alone.

The $10 billion figure is actually half the amount Musk said in April Tesla would spend on artificial intelligence computing power this year. “Tesla will spend about $10 billion this year on blended learning and artificial intelligence, with the latter primarily used in cars,” he wrote at the time. “Any company that doesn’t spend at this level and doesn’t spend efficiently can’t compete.”

By this measure, Musk’s artificial intelligence efforts already lag behind wealthy rivals such as Microsoft, OpenAI and Google. In July, for example, analysts estimated that OpenAI would spend about $7 billion on artificial intelligence computing while losing about $5 billion on other operating costs. However, in early October, the company announced that its latest round of investment funding was $6.6 billion at a post-money valuation of $157 billion. “The new funding will allow us to double down on our leadership in cutting-edge artificial intelligence research, increase computing power, and continue building tools.” that help people solve complex problems,” the company wrote in its announcement.

Both Microsoft and Meta are spending freely to develop their artificial intelligence computing capabilities, according to a Reuters report on Thursday. Microsoft is reported to be spending the same amount of capital each quarter as it spent annually before 2020. The company also said its capital spending increased more than 5% in the first quarter of 2024, to $20 billion, and it expects to continue to spend more in the second quarter. Meta, for its part, spent the same amount of capital each quarter in 2024 as it did each year before 2017.

As for Google, it reportedly spent $13 billion on capital expenditures in the third quarter of 2024, up 63% from the same period last year. Additionally, the company has invested approximately $38 billion in IT infrastructure year-to-date, representing an 80% increase over the first three quarters of 2023. Suddenly $10 billion between a couple of companies and a handful of projects seems almost quaint.