Elon Musk’s xAI has decided to forego a $10 billion deal with Oracle to use their cloud servers for building its artificial intelligence training infrastructure. Instead, xAI is opting to purchase chips to create a data center on its own. Musk explained that the decision to train their next major system in-house using Nvidia’s H100 GPUs stems from the need to be faster than their competitors.
Reportedly, xAI’s Grok 2 model was trained on 24,000 Nvidia H100 chips from Oracle and is expected to launch next month after some additional adjustments. Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison mentioned in a September 2023 earnings call that there was a deal in place with xAI to provide cloud infrastructure for training AI models, but details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Musk was said to have pushed Oracle to build a supercomputer that was faster than originally thought possible and had concerns about the power supply at the preferred location for the data center.
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https://www.mobileworldlive.com/ai-cloud/xai-ends-talks-with-oracle-over-10b-server-deal/