Jensen Huang hails Elon Musk and xAI for building an AI supercomputer at ‘superhuman’ speed

Jensen Huang praised Elon Musk in an interview on the “BG2 Pod” podcast.

Nvidia chief Jensen Huang has praised Elon Musk after his startup xAI built a supercomputer in 19 days, an effort that he said would take others years.

In an episode of the “Bg2 Pod” podcast that aired Sunday, Huang said it was a “superhuman” undertaking to build the supercomputer in Memphis in such a short timeframe.

Huang said, “As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it’s just unbelievable.”

xAI built its supercomputer, called Colossus, from a cluster of 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs. In September, Musk said in an X post that it took 122 days “from start to finish” to bring the training cluster online, appearing to refer to the total project time.

The Nvidia CEO also commended xAI’s engineering, software, networking, and infrastructure teams, and called them “extraordinary.”

In an interview with Jordan Peterson on X in June, Musk said it took 19 days to get Colossus from hardware installation to beginning training. He added that this was “the fastest by far anyone’s been able to do that.”

Huang also commented on the supercluster: “Just to put it in perspective, 100,000 GPUs—that’s easily the fastest supercomputer on the planet as one cluster.”

He added, “A supercomputer that you would build would take normally three years to plan and then they deliver the equipment and it takes one year to get it all working.”

xAI launched in 2023, and the company released the latest version of its AI chatbot, Grok-2, in August. Earlier in the year, xAI announced that it raised $6 billion in a fresh funding round.

Oracle cofounder and chairman Larry Ellison said in September that he had dinner with Musk and Huang at Nobu in Palo Alto, where the longtime friends were “begging” Huang for GPUs.

He said that they told Huang, “Please take our money….we need you to take more of our money,” before he quipped, “It went OK, it worked.”

Nvidia and Elon Musk didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from B-17, made outside normal working hours.