We love seeing the inside of a supercomputer, and one of our recent favorites is Nvidia's glimpse of Eos, the ninth-fastest supercomputer on the planet.
Now, Elon Musk has provided a glimpse of the massive artificial intelligence supercluster, recently dubbed Cortex, that powers X (formerly Twitter).
The supercluster, currently under construction at Tesla’s Giga Texas plant, will house 70,000 AI servers, with an initial power and cooling requirement of 130 megawatts, expanding to 500 megawatts by 2026.
Tesla's artificial intelligence strategy
In the video, embedded below, Musk shows off rows upon rows of server racks that could house as many as 2,000 GPU servers — just a fraction of the 50,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs and 20,000 units of Tesla hardware expected to eventually fill Cortex. The video, while brief, offers a rare inside look at the infrastructure that will soon power Tesla’s most ambitious AI projects.
Video from inside Cortex today, the new giant AI training supercluster being built at Tesla's Austin headquarters to solve real-world AI problems. pic.twitter.com/DwJVUWUrb5August 26, 2024
Cortex is being developed to enhance Tesla's artificial intelligence capabilities, in particular to train the Full Self-Driving (FSD) Autopilot system used in its cars and the Optimus robot, an autonomous humanoid that will go into limited production in 2025. The supercluster's cooling system, which features massive fans and liquid cooling provided by Supermicro, is designed to handle the extensive power demands, which, Tom's Hardware Store points out, is comparable to a large coal-fired power plant.
Cortex is part of Musk's broader strategy to deploy multiple supercomputers, including the operational Memphis Supercluster, powered by 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, and the upcoming $500 million Dojo supercomputer in Buffalo, New York.
Despite some delays in upgrading to Nvidia's latest Blackwell GPUs, Musk's aggressive acquisition of AI hardware shows Tesla's interest in being at the forefront of AI development.
The divisive billionaire said earlier this year that the company planned to spend “over a billion dollars” on Nvidia and AMD hardware this year alone just to remain competitive in the AI space.
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