Elon Musk has so far spent around $10 billion on AI training hardware this year, allowing his team to set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days — a process that usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Although Nvidia powers Elon’s AI processors, he still needs a CPU to direct the AI cluster’s massive processing power. Pat Gelsinger’s post confirms that the xAI team chose Intel Xeon processors to drive their AI head node. Team Blue launched its latest 128-core flagship CPU called Granite Rapids in September 2024, but Gelsinger did not confirm which model the team uses.
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Aside from exploring xAI’s massive AI cluster, we don’t know if Pat Gelsinger had other reasons for visiting the Memphis data center. Musk plans to double the GPUs on the site to 200,000 shortly, and he even mentioned plans to go as high as 300,000, although it seems that it will be a later phase of expansion. All these additional GPUs will still reportedly be Nvidia AI accelerators and could be Blackwell GPUs, so it’s unlikely that Pat is selling Elon some of Intel’s Gaudi 3 chips.
However, such a massive GPU purchase means that xAI would also need many CPUs, so he might try staying in Musk’s good graces to sell more Xeon chips. After all, even though xAI isn’t buying Intel’s AI chips yet, it still would do the company well if it could move its data center CPUs, helping it recover from its financial troubles revealed in August this year.