Tech billionaire Elon Musk has announced to investors his intention to construct a supercomputer, referred to as the ‘gigafactory of compute,’ aimed at advancing the capabilities of his AI venture, xAI, according to a report by an industry news source on May 25, 2024.
Musk’s ambitious plan involves assembling a system using 100,000 Nvidia chips. He aims to have this supercomputer fully operational by the autumn of 2025 and has personally committed to ensuring its timely completion, as reported by The Information.
The proposed supercomputer is expected to be at least four times larger than the largest existing GPU clusters, such as those utilized by Meta for AI training, Musk noted in a recent investor presentation.
The rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in 2022 has ignited intense rivalry among major tech corporations like Microsoft, Google, and Meta, as well as startups like Anthropic and Stability AI in the AI sector. Musk, with his substantial financial resources, is positioned as a formidable competitor in this landscape.
Furthermore, xAI, a company Musk is spearheading, is developing Grok, a chatbot capable of interfacing in real-time with the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), which Musk also owns.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but departed in 2018 due to disagreements over the company’s direction under CEO Sam Altman, has since taken legal action against OpenAI. He accuses it of deviating from its original non-profit mission to democratize AI research.
OpenAI contends that Musk’s lawsuit and his push for open-source development stem from dissatisfaction following his exit from the organization.
