Musk reportedly shifted thousands of AI chips from Tesla to X

Elon Musk has ordered thousands of Nvidia-made artificial intelligence chips destined for Tesla to be diverted to his social media company X, according to an email from the chipmaker obtained by CNBC. The move may delay Tesla's $500 million processor purchase by several months, CNBC reports.

According to Musk, Tesla is expected to acquire Nvidia's H100 AI chips to fuel its transformation into a "leader in artificial intelligence and robotics." In Tesla's earnings call earlier in the year, he said the company would increase its supply of H100 chips from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of the year. Later, in a post on the X portal, Musk said that Tesla would spend $10 billion "on combined training and inference of artificial intelligence."

But emails from Nvidia employees obtained by CNBC show that Musk wasn't entirely honest about buying AI chips for Tesla. Instead, many of those processors are now on their way to Company X, and even more to its artificial intelligence subsidiary xAI.

"Elon is prioritizing the deployment of the X H100 GPU cluster in X ahead of Tesla by shifting 12,000 shipments of H100 GPUs originally intended for Tesla to X," Nvidia said in a December announcement, according to CNBC.

Musk said in a post on Portal X after the CNBC story was published that Tesla does not have the capacity to receive Nvidia's GPUs because the company's factory in Austin, Texas, is unfinished. He also estimated that Tesla will spend $3-4 billion on Nvidia's AI chips in 2024.

The shift of AI chips from Tesla to Company X could unnerve Tesla investors who are betting that Musk will make good on his promise of fully autonomous vehicles. The company plans to unveil its first robotaxi vehicle at an event in August. Meanwhile, Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving driver-assistance features, which serve as the company's cornerstone of autonomy, have come under scrutiny for hundreds of crashes, dozens of which have resulted in fatalities.