Elon Musk has reportedly purchased a lot of GPUs for a Twitter AI project

Elon Musk

Elon Musk has reportedly okayed the purchase of 10,000 data centre-grade GPUs for use at one of Twitter's data centres.

As reported by Business Insider, the big purchase is supposedly for an Artificial Intelligence (AI) project that will be handled in-house.

An insider source told the publication that Musk was committed to the project and spent a lot of money acquiring the GPUs.

Data centre Graphics Processing Units (GPU) are specialised hardware that accelerates the performance of technologies like AI computations, rendering, analytics, 3D modelling and simulation.

The secret project at Twitter is reportedly a generative AI, that the company would train using its own data reserves.

Musk has been a vocal critic of OpenAI's ChatGPT and the current generation of AI chatbots that have sprung up based on the company's technology like Microsoft's Bing AI.

He was among the executives who signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause in AI development till new data guidelines and ethics principles were established.

In February, Musk reportedly hired a former researcher from Google's DeepMind AI labs, Igor Babuschkin. The billionaire has also approached other experts in the field with the idea of setting up an AI lab.