Washington: Billionaire tech tycoon Elon Musk told investors he plans to build a supercomputer dubbed a “gigafactory of computing” to support the development of his artificial intelligence startup xAI, an industry news outlet reported on Saturday.
Musk wants the supercomputer – which will assemble 100,000 Nvidia chips – to become operational in the fall of 2025 and “will be personally responsible for delivering it on time,” The Information reports.
The planned supercomputer will be “at least four times larger than the largest existing GPU clusters,” such as those used by Meta to train artificial intelligence models, Musk said during a presentation to investors this month.
Since OpenAi’s ChatGPT generative AI tool entered the market in 2022, the technology has become an area of fierce competition between tech giants Microsoft and Google, as well as Meta and startups such as Anthropic and Stability AI.
Musk is one of the few investors in the world with deep enough pockets to compete with OpenAI, Google and Meta in AI.
xAI is developing a chatbot called Grok that can gain real-time access to social media platform X, the former Twitter, which Musk also owns.
Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but left the company in 2018, later stating that he was uncomfortable with the for-profit direction the company was taking under CEO Sam Altman.
In March, he filed a lawsuit against the company, accusing it of violating the nonprofit’s original mission of making artificial intelligence research accessible to everyone.
OpenAI argues that Musk’s lawsuit, as well as his approach to open source development, is little more than a case of sour grapes after leaving the company.
