What you need to know
- Elon Musk’s xAI team reportedly set up a powerful supercomputer featuring 100,000 H200 Blackwell GPUs in 19 days.
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang claims the same process would ordinarily take up to 4 years to execute, prompting him to call Elon Musk “superhuman.”
- Huang also indicated that NVIDIA played a significant role in the process, offering their networking expertise to xAI as NVIDIA gear is complicated compared to traditional data center servers.
Earlier this year, Tesla owner Elon Musk announced that xAI has begun training Grok AI with the world’s most powerful AI cluster powered by 100,000 liquid-cooled NVIDIA H100 graphic processing units (GPUs) connected with a single RDMA. The cluster could make X’s Grok AI chatbot “the world’s most powerful AI by every metric” by the end of this year.
And now, the billionaire’s vision has seemingly come to fruition. While recently speaking to Tesla Owners in Silicon Valley on X, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang lauded Elon Musk’s efforts after setting up a supercluster featuring 100,000 H200 Blackwell GPUs in 19 days to power xAI’s advances.
Elon Musk is super human. What would take everyone else a year, only took him 19 days. pic.twitter.com/q51sM48lsuOctober 13, 2024
For context, Huang describes setting up xAI’s supercomputer as a tedious and daunting task that requires well-versed professionals. He further indicated that transitioning the project from the concept phase to the final output could conventionally take up to 4 years — a feat that Elon Musk achieved in 19 days. The CEO breaks down the highlighted time into 3 years of planning and a year of shipping equipment, installation, and getting the entire project to work.
Related: Elon Musk’s xAI developed Colossus in just 122 days
According to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang:
“As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it’s just unbelievable.”
The process included the construction of infrastructure for the supercomputer, which is fully equipped with liquid cooling and power to support the cutting-edge components, including 200,000 GPUs. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang also indicated that his team collaborated closely with xAI during the project across engineering, networking, infrastructure, and software. He admitted that NVIDIA’s equipment is rather sophisticated, making the networking process a tad complicated compared to traditional data center servers.
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