The planned billion dollar deal between Oracle and the AI startup xAI Elon Musk (53) burst. The xAI and TeslaCEO Musk said on Tuesday on his short message service Nvidia build.
The industry service “The Information” had previously reported that discussions about the deal with a potential value of ten billion US dollars (9.24 billion euros) had been ended. Among other things, Oracle viewed the construction time required by Musk as unrealistic, it said, citing several people involved in the negotiations. In addition, he has SAP-Competitor expressed concerns about power supply.
Musk is planning “the most powerful training cluster in the world”
The deal was intended to expand an existing deal where xAI would provide Nvidia chips for the artificial intelligence
(AI) rents from the cloud provider. However, Musk wrote on “If our fate depends on being the fastest by far, we have to take the steering wheel into our own hands instead of sitting in the back seat.” An Oracle statement was not initially available.
xAI currently offers the chatbot Grok, a generative AI that basically uses the same technology as ChatGPT from the Microsoft partner OpenAI uses. Musk has now explained that the successor, Grok 2, has been trained with 24,000 H100 chips rented from Oracle and is likely to be released next month. The new system with 100,000 H100 units will be “by far the most powerful training cluster in the world,” Musk wrote.
The chip is Nvidia’s flagship and is from 2022. With it in particular, the US company achieved a market share of 80 percent last year.