NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang calls Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer a ‘superhuman’ feat

Jensen Huang

Elon Musk’s AI company xAI’ has come under heavy praise from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. In an interview with B2g Pod, Huang said that what Musk and xAI have done is extraordinary. "As far as I know, there's only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshalling resources; it's just unbelievable.”

The supercomputer in question is Colossus, which was built from a cluster of 100,000 Nvidia GPUs. While it didn’t take 19 days exactly as Musk said that the entire project took 122 days from start to finish. However, Musk had claimed in June that from hardware installation to begin training, Colossus took only 19 days.

Huang was impressed by xAI’s engineering, networking, infrastructure and software teams. He referred to them as “extraordinary”.

Huang said that by putting 100,000 GPUs, Colossus has become “easily the fastest supercomputer on the planet as one cluster."

He also said that it would normally take a lot more time for the supercomputer to be up and running. “A supercomputer that you would build would take normally three years to plan and then they deliver the equipment and it takes one year to get it all working,” he added.

Nvidia’s GPUs have been at the core of AI acceleration and the company’s valuation in the last two years has grown exponentially.