Musk reportedly shifted thousands of AI chips from Tesla to X

Elon Musk has ordered thousands of Nvidia-made artificial intelligence chips destined for Tesla to be diverted to his social media company X, according to an email from the chipmaker obtained by CNBC. The move may delay Tesla's $500 million processor purchase by several months, CNBC reports.

Tesla is reportedly buying Nvidia’s H100 AI chips to power its transformation into “a leader in AI and robotics,” Musk said in a Tesla earnings call earlier this year. He said the company would increase its H100 chip purchases from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of the year. Later, Musk said in a post on X that Tesla would spend $10 billion “on hybrid AI training and inference.”

But emails from Nvidia employees obtained by CNBC show that Musk wasn't entirely honest about buying AI chips for Tesla. Instead, many of those processors are now on their way to Company X, and even more to its artificial intelligence subsidiary xAI.

“Elon is prioritizing the deployment of the X H100 GPU cluster to X over Tesla by redirecting 12,000 shipped H100 GPUs originally intended for Tesla to X,” Nvidia’s December announcement read, according to CNBC.

Musk said in a post on Portal X after the CNBC story was published that Tesla does not have the capacity to receive Nvidia's GPUs because the company's factory in Austin, Texas, is unfinished. He also estimated that Tesla will spend $3-4 billion on Nvidia's AI chips in 2024.

The shift of AI chips from Tesla to Company X could unnerve Tesla investors who are betting that Musk will make good on his promise of fully autonomous vehicles. The company plans to unveil its first robotaxi vehicle at an event in August. Meanwhile, Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver-assistance features, which serve as the company's cornerstone of autonomy, have come under scrutiny for hundreds of crashes, dozens of which have resulted in fatalities.