Tesla CEO, Elon Musk (L), and Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang (R).
Reuters
In November 2023, at an all-hands meeting with employees, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was asked whether the company would follow the lead of Apple and Disney and suspend its advertising on X due to rising levels of antisemitism and other hate speech on the platform.
X owner Elon Musk said earlier that month that he agreed with a post on the site that accused “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred against whites.” Numerous brands — Disney and Apple among them — moved quickly to pause their ad campaigns.
Huang’s response was firm but diplomatic, according to people who were listening to the meeting but asked not to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. He said the chipmaker hadn’t advertised on X in a very long time and had no plans to do so. However, Huang also emphasized that Nvidia would never make public statements against another business.
Left out of Huang’s commentary at the time was any detail regarding Nvidia’s increasing coziness with Musk’s business empire.
Nvidia is seeing soaring demand for its graphics processing units (GPUs) and related hardware and services, a boom that’s lifted the company’s market cap well past $2 trillion. Nvidia’s products, including new accelerator chips, provide computing power for generative artificial intelligence workloads, robotics, research and data center projects.
Revenue in the latest quarter jumped a whopping 265% to $22.1 billion, and last year Nvidia surpassed Intel in total sales.
Musk has made promises that his companies will develop sophisticated AI products, and doing so requires buying up a lot of Nvidia’s technology.
Their cozy relationship was on display this week at Nvidia’s annual GTC conference in San Jose, California. The event, which attracted roughly 16,000 attendees including celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Kendrick Lamar, had two sessions featuring leaders of xAI, the startup Musk formally revealed in July 2023.
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