Elon Musk said Wednesday night it would be “an honor” to hire Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, answering a one-line suggestion on X.
The markets site ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” at 6:22 p.m. ET. Musk replied two hours later: “That would be an honor.” It is a two-post exchange, not an announcement, and neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded on X as of Wednesday night.
The banter lands on one of the tightest supplier relationships in tech. On SpaceXSI’s August earnings call, Musk said, “going forward, we’ve decided to build exclusively on NVIDIA because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture.” On Oct. 26, SpaceXSI said it had a binding commitment to enter into a roughly $40 billion lease of GPUs and related equipment with an Apollo-managed entity, a deal it said will deliver “the next generation of NVIDIA Vera Rubin chips.” The leases are expected to begin in the first half of 2027. SpaceXSI reported 1.7 gigawatts of installed compute capacity on Sept. 30, up from 0.6 gigawatts a year earlier.
Musk is also building a chip supply of his own. SpaceXSI and Tesla said Aug. 6 that Terafab, a vertically integrated complex for logic, memory, packaging and testing, will be built in Grimes County, Texas. They put the initial investment at about $16.8 billion and described a plant of more than 100 million square feet employing at least 3,000 people. The companies said their combined chip demand is expected to exceed 1 terawatt of compute, “significantly larger than the current global supply,” and called themselves “deeply appreciative of our current chip suppliers.” On the Oct. 20 earnings call, Musk said Terafab aims for volume production around the third quarter of 2028 and that he puts “big error bars” on those internal targets.
Huang praised how fast Musk builds in 2024. Nvidia said xAI and Nvidia built the 100,000-GPU Colossus cluster in Memphis in 122 days, with 19 days from the first rack on the floor to the start of training. On the BG2 podcast, Huang called the effort “superhuman” and said Musk “is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources.”
The two schedules run in parallel. The Vera Rubin leases start in 2027, and Musk said on the Oct. 20 call that he aims to have Terafab’s first test chip, an SRAM-type chip built at the research fab in Austin, working in approximately May or June of that year. Until then, Nvidia remains the supplier Musk has said he is building on.