November 30, 2024 – Following his visit to Elon Musk’s Memphis Supercomputing Center, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger expressed his admiration for the xAI team and promoted the company’s Xeon CPUs.
In a post on social media, Gelsinger revealed that xAI had chosen Intel Xeon processors for its head nodes, which are responsible for managing resource allocation across the entire computing cluster. He described the system, which oversees a massive 100,000 GPU cluster, as “incredible to build out at such scale in such a short time.”
Musk had previously stated that he had spent approximately $10 billion on AI hardware this year, enabling his team to deploy 100,000 NVIDIA H200 GPUs in just 19 days. This feat, which according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang would typically take four years, is a testament to the power of deep investment.
While the AI computing cluster primarily relies on NVIDIA GPUs, it still requires a CPU to orchestrate and unify the vast computing power generated by the 100,000 H200s. Gelsinger confirmed that the xAI team had selected Intel Xeon processors for this critical role. Although Intel launched its latest 128-core flagship product, Granite Rapids, in September 2024, he did not specify which Xeon model the xAI team was using.
In addition, Gelsinger praised Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, as Dell is also a supplier of the xAI head node servers. Musk had previously confirmed the purchase of server rack systems from Supermicro, but it remains unclear whether they have been replaced by Dell servers, or if Dell servers are only being used for the head nodes while Supermicro equipment is deployed in the rest of the datacenter.
Looking ahead, Musk plans to double the number of GPUs in the cluster to 200,000 in the near future, with the possibility of increasing it to 300,000. These additional GPUs are likely to be from NVIDIA, potentially including the newly released Blackwell model. As a result, Gelsinger faces a challenge in promoting Intel’s Gaudi 3 chips to Musk.
However, the planned expansion of GPUs also signifies a growing demand for CPUs. Therefore, maintaining a strong partnership with Musk could be crucial for Gelsinger, as it could lead to increased sales of Xeon chips and help Intel recover from its current financial difficulties.
