Larry Ellison says he and Elon Musk ‘begged’ Jensen Huang for GPUs over dinner
Larry Ellison and Elon Musk.
Larry Ellison really, really wants to get his hands on more Nvidia GPUs.
The Oracle cofounder and chairman said he had dinner with Elon Musk and Nvidia chief Jensen Huang at Nobu in Palo Alto, where the longtime friends were “begging” Huang for GPUs.
On Oracle’s earnings call last week, Ellison said: “I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs.”
He added 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.”
Many Big Tech firms rely on Nvidia as their main supplier of GPUs, which are needed to build and train AI models.
During Oracle’s second-quarter earnings call last December — for its fiscal year 2024 — Ellison said his company provided Musk’s startup xAI with GPUs to train its model Grok. He said, “They got that up and running, but boy did they want a lot more GPUs than we gave them; we’re in the process of getting them more.”
In last week’s earnings call, the billionaire investor also discussed his bullish stance on AI. He said the race for companies to build and train models over the next five years will be “astronomical” and upward of $100 billion.
The cloud provider even has permits to build three nuclear reactors to power a data center he said Oracle is building, along with a supercomputer made up of up to 131,072 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs.
Ellison also talked about how AI will change society in the future. He predicted that AI will be used to monitor citizens, supervise police officers and report them if there’s a problem. “Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on,” he said.
Oracle didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17, made outside normal working hours.
