Elon Musk has unveiled Tesla’s newest project, Cortex, a sophisticated AI training supercluster located at the company’s headquarters in Austin. In a recent post on X, Musk unveiled what the Cortex supercluster looks like, with an emphasis on the many supercomputers that were said to improve real-world AI.
Video of the inside of Cortex today, the giant new AI training supercluster being built at Tesla HQ in Austin to solve real-world AI pic.twitter.com/DwJVUWUrb5
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2024
Cortex is expected to help enhance Tesla’s AI models and play a significant part in its growth. These models are very useful in improving Tesla’s electric automobiles, energy storage products, and other technologies.
Musk announces major GPU cluster expansion
In early July, Musk unveiled plans to launch a 50,000 GPU cluster, an expansion of Tesla’s custom AI chip supercomputer known as Dojo. This expansion will effectively double Tesla’s computing capacity, allowing for the advancement of Full Self-Driving (FSD) and other AI projects.
In conjunction with this, Musk discussed recent developments that have emerged with Nvidia. Leaked emails revealed schemes to redirect thousands of GPUs that were supposed to go to Tesla and to some other Musk projects, X and xAI. Musk stated that these GPUs are vital for Tesla’s AI and are necessary to fill the data centers that are important to the company’s AI.
According to Tesla’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja, capital expenditures for the company are likely to be more than $10 billion, even though Q2 capex was lower. This is consistent with Musk’s vision of enhancing Tesla’s AI technology while the company is struggling with financial challenges.
Tesla’s earnings in the second quarter were not as good as expected, as both its revenues and profits dropped. However, Musk is quite determined to upgrade Tesla’s artificial intelligence capabilities.
Musk commits to Dojo supercomputer upgrades
Musk has shown his dedication to the Dojo supercomputer, with a targeted training capacity of 8,000 H100 equivalents by the end of the year. This move is a testament to Tesla’s desire to fulfill the increasing demand for Nvidia GPUs and enhance its AI capabilities.
And Dojo 1 will have roughly 8k H100-equivalent of training online by end of year.Not massive, but not trivial either.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2024
Additionally, Musk’s AI startup xAI is expected to launch Grok 2 in August this year. The company is also developing Grok 3, which is expected to rival OpenAI’s GPT-5, which is expected to be released in the near future.
Recently, nearly 1,400 Tesla shareholders signed a petition demanding that the company’s board allocate at least $5 billion to xAI. The shareholders have claimed that the said investment could be beneficial for Tesla in the AI sector.
1,383 Tesla shareholders with approx. 4 million shares signed the letter to Tesla's Board, asking them to consider an investment in xAI. 97% gave full information. Thank you for the trust.Will be mailed tomorrow. @travisraxelrod https://t.co/qJotCOhl9R pic.twitter.com/017fjUsyyu
— Ale𝕏andra Merz 🇺🇲 (@TeslaBoomerMama) August 12, 2024
xAI secured $6 billion in its Series B funding round in May, which was higher than the initial valuation estimates. Some of the investors were Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The funding has raised the valuation of the xAI to $24 billion.