Elon Musk Forced To Compete With NVIDIA With AI Supercomputer Because Of High Costs, Tight Supply

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Tesla's is aiming to compete with NVIDIA in machine learning through its Dojo supercomputer, according to fresh remarks from Elon Musk. Musk shared the latest bit of details for his firm's AI plans at Tesla's earnings call earlier today after a financial report that missed Wall Street estimates. During the call, he bemoaned the tight supply capacity of NVIDIA's GPUs, which are widely viewed in the industry as the top performers for computing AI workloads.

This has led Musk to conclude that Tesla has no choice but to compete with NVIDIA through its own supercomputer. Tesla's Dojo uses its in house D1 chip, and future variants will use an upgraded D2 chip, which the firm revealed in late 2022, well ahead of the start of the current AI wave.

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Tesla Has "No Choice" But To Make Custom AI Chip Work Due To Tight Capacity For NVIDIA's Products, Says Musk

Over the past couple of years, Musk has shared a slew of new products for Tesla, including its manufacturing robot called Optimus and new vehicles. These have pushed its Dojo supercomputer in the background, and today's call saw a Tesla investor ask him about the supercomputer's future. AI is key to Tesla's future since it uses machine learning (a subset of AI technologies) to train its assisted driving platform called Full Self Driving (FSD).

In response, while commending NVIDIA on its "execution and the capability of their hardware," Musk lamented that "the demand for NVIDIA hardware is so high that, uh, it's often difficult to get the GPUs." Musk is concerned "about actually being able to get state of the art NVIDIA GPUs when we want them," which necessitates Tesla to focus more resources on Dojo to "ensure that we've got the training capability that we