Elon Musk ordered Nvidia to ship thousands of AI chips reserved for Tesla to X and xAI

Elon Musk claims he can grow Tesla into “a leader in AI & robotics,” an ambition that he’s said will require a lot of pricey processors from Nvidia to build up its infrastructure.

On Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call in April, Musk said the electric vehicle company will increase the number of active H100s — Nvidia’s flagship artificial intelligence chip — from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of this year. He also wrote in a post on X a few days later that Tesla would spend $10 billion this year “in combined training and inference AI.”

But emails written by Nvidia senior staff and widely shared inside the company suggest that Musk presented an exaggerated picture of Tesla’s procurement to shareholders. Correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicates that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter.