© Reuters ‘Not Clear,’ Quips Elon Musk As Tesla Enthusiast Questions Meta’s Plan To Buy Nvidia’s AI Chips Equivalent To 8 Times Tesla’s Computing Needs
Benzinga – by Shanthi Rexaline, Benzinga Editor.
Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ:META) CEO Mark Zuckerberg provided an update on the company’s AI efforts in a Facebook post this week, and, on Saturday, Elon Musk commented on one detail shared by the Meta CEO.
What Happened: Zuckerberg said Meta is building a massive compute infrastructure to support its future roadmap, including the use of 350,000 H100s AI accelerator chips from Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) by the end of 2024. Including other GPUs, the social-media giant will use almost 600,000 H100s-equivalent of compute, he added.
One Tesla enthusiast, Dave Lee, shared a post on X by Ark Invest’s Director of Research for Next Generation Internet Frank Downing in which he said the 600,000 H100 equivalents is about eight times Tesla, Inc.’s (NASDAQ:TSLA) roadmap by the end of 2024. One H100 is equal to four A100s, the analyst noted.
“The 350k H100 target by end of 2024 suggests a more than doubling of total GPU compute since H100 started volume shipping in Q1 2023,” Downing said.
“To be fair, Tesla’s relative compute increase is also insane, targeted to grow their base by ~20x in a year and a half.”
Reposting Downing’s post, Lee asked, “What is Meta/Facebook going to do with 600,000 H100 (and equivalent) GPUs by end of this year?”
Replying to him, a bemused Musk said, “Not clear.”
Not clear
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 20, 2024
Why It’s Important: Zuckerberg said in his post that Meta’s long-term vision is to build AI, open-source it responsibly and make it widely available so everyone can benefit.
“We’re bringing our two major AI research efforts (FAIR and GenAI) closer together to support this,” he said.
Zuckerberg also noted that the company is currently training its next-gen model Llama 3.
“Also really excited about our progress building new AI-centric computing devices like Ray Ban Meta smart glasses,” he added.
Tesla, meanwhile, is using AI to perfect its autonomous driving technology. Real-world data collected from its electric vehicles across the world is fed into a high-performance computing system. Self-driving software is seen as a high-margin recurring revenue stream for Tesla and could also be central to the robotaxi service Elon Musk announced in 2023.
Tesla ended Friday’s session up 0.15% at $212.19 and Meta climbed 1.95% to $383.45, according to Benzinga Pro data.
Read Next: Meta Platforms Is Wall Street’s Top Internet Pick, Analysts Laud AI Investments and Advertising Strength
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Wanda Parisien is a computing expert who navigates the vast landscape of hardware and software. With a focus on computer technology, software development, and industry trends, Wanda delivers informative content, tutorials, and analyses to keep readers updated on the latest in the world of computing.
