Elon Musk wants to buy 300,000 Nvidia Blackwells to power new xAI ambitions
As AI models get even bigger and more energy hungry buyers are lining up around the block for Nvidia's latest ultra-powerful GPUs.
Key takeaways
- In an X post, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO revealed that he wants to buy 300,000 worth of Nvidia's latest Blackwell B200 GPUs by next summer.
- The AI was developed on a homebrewed language dubbed Grok-1 that is geared to provide less straightforward answers as well as witty and comedic answers compared to ChatGPT and Gemini.
- Nvidia's new Blackwell B200 is a massive upgrade over the H100, offering four times the training performance and 30 times the inference performance.
Cite or link to this article
Griffin, M. (2024) 'Elon Musk wants to buy 300,000 Nvidia Blackwells to power new xAI ambitions', 311 Institute, 30 July. Available at: https://www.311institute.com/elon-musk-wants-to-buy-300000-nvidia-blackwells-to-power-new-xai-ambitions/ (Accessed: 1 October 2026).
Artificial Intelligence (AI) GPU development is running at breakneck speeds, and Elon Musk wants to be at the forefront of the revolution. In an X post, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO revealed that he wants to buy 300,000 worth of Nvidia's latest Blackwell B200 GPUs by next summer. The new GPUs will upgrade X's existing AI GPU cluster, which currently consists of 100,000 previous-generation H100 GPUs.
100,000 H100 GPUs is already an enormous amount of computing power, but Elon states that given the pace of AI GPU development, it's not worth keeping around X's massive array of H100 GPUs for long, mainly due to its energy consumption of 1 Gigawatt – which is huge!
X uses the massive array of AI GPUs for Grok, an AI bot. The AI was developed on a homebrewed language dubbed Grok-1 that is geared to provide less straightforward answers as well as witty and comedic answers compared to ChatGPT and Gemini. Basically, it is trying to take the "robot" aspect out of the AI bot. The new AI bot is available to X users right now; however, you'll need to be an X Premium user to gain access to the AI bot.
Musk's logic has merit. The AI GPU development race is one of the most heated races we've seen in years in the technological industry, rivalling the CPU development wars we had in the 1990s and 2000s. Nvidia's new Blackwell B200 is a massive upgrade over the H100, offering four times the training performance and 30 times the inference performance.
Technically, the B200 does consume more power. However, the B200's colossal performance improvements mean the chip runs significantly more efficiently than the H100. In Musk's case, trading 100,000 H100s for three times more GPUs that consume even more power is still a net win due to the GPUs' incredible amount of additional AI performance.
It'll be interesting to see when Musk does get his hands on all 300,000 B200 GPUs. If Nvidia's H100 has taught us anything, it's that its AI GPU demand always outstrips actual supply. We will probably see a repeat of 2023, when all the big AI customers, including X, Meta, Google, Microsoft, and others, are fighting to grab as many B200s as Nvidia can pump out for at least the next several months.
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Why does this matter?
As AI models get even bigger and more energy hungry buyers are lining up around the block for Nvidia's latest ultra-powerful GPUs.
About the author
Matthew Griffin Founder, 311 Institute
Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath."
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Matthew Griffin is a multi-award winning Futurist and expert in Disruption and Innovation, Geopolitics, Leadership, and Technology, who NASA have described as a "walking encyclopaedia of the future" and a "futurist Polymath." 15-time best selling author of the "Codex of the Future" series, Matthew is the Founder and Futurist in Chief of the 311 Institute, a global Futures and Deep Futures advisory firm working with royal households, world leaders, G7, G20, and G77 governments, NGOs, and multi-national mid and mega cap firms to help them explore, shape, and lead the next 50 years of business and society.
An award-winning YouTube creator with over a million followers, with an unrivalled global reach and impact, Matthew is a highly sought-after international keynote speaker, lecturer, and mentor who collaborates with global leaders through the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations (UNAOC) and United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) to shape pivotal initiatives such as the UN’s AI for Humanity program, the United Nations Conference of the Parties (UN COP), and the World Economic Forum in Davos.
As the former Global Head of Cloud, National Security, and Enterprise Sales for companies including Atos, Dell-EMC, and IBM, Matthew has a proven track record of building multi-billion dollar business units and turning failing divisions into market leaders. His ability to identify, analyse, and communicate the implications of hundreds of emerging technologies and trends is unparalleled, and his insights are trusted by many of the world’s most respected organisations, including ABB, Accenture, Adidas, AON, ARM, BCG, Centrica, Citi, Coca-Cola, Dentons, Deloitte, Dow Jones, EY, Google, KPMG, Lego, Legal & General, LinkedIn, Microsoft, PepsiCo, Qualcomm, RWE, Samsung, Siemens AG and Siemens Energy, T-Mobile, UBS, VISA, Walmart, Workday, Worldpay and many others.
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Sources and further reading
- an X post x.com
Source: first published by the 311 Institute on 30 July 2024. Cite as: Griffin, M. (2024). Elon Musk wants to buy 300,000 Nvidia Blackwells to power new xAI ambitions. 311 Institute. https://www.311institute.com/elon-musk-wants-to-buy-300000-nvidia-blackwells-to-power-new-xai-ambitions/
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