Nvidia’s star founder Jensen Huang endorsed Tesla’s strategy for AI-powered autonomous vehicles just weeks before a key vote that will determine whether CEO Elon Musk receives his record compensation.
Musk is putting practically everything on the company recent turn to AIafter he had quietly failed His vision is that the volume will increase more than tenfold by 2030, to 20 million vehicles per year – as much as Toyota And Volkswagen sell combined.
“Tesla is way ahead in self-driving cars,” Huang said in an interview with Yahoo Finance uploaded To Youtube End of last week.
The AI focus is controversial, as it moves Tesla further away from its stated mission to accelerate the global transition to sustainable transportation. And while Musk’s so-called “supervised fully autonomous driving” may be the most well-known advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) on the market, few customers saw the value in opting for 15,000 US dollars for a system that would require them to keep an eye on their car as it drives through city streets.
As a result, Musk was forced to lower the price back to $8,000, the level it was at when he first launched the FSD beta in October 2020.
High-quality confirmation
A confirmation from people like Huang, whose drawing at Developer conferences The announcement that the games are now filling entire stadiums could allay investors’ concerns that he himself may have gone off course.
“The technology is truly revolutionary and the work they are doing is incredible,” the Nvidia boss continued.
What kind of rock concert is this? No, it is Jensen Huang’s keynote at@nvidia‘S #AGB24. Wow, what a difference a few years makes! pic.twitter.com/RqsiOg6Q2D
— Bob O’Donnell (@bobodtech) March 18, 2024
In a few weeks, shareholders are set to vote for a second time on Musk’s record compensation package – worth about $55 billion at the current share price – after a Delaware court in January invalid the original vote in 2018 for procedural reasons related to the quality of Tesla’s corporate governance.
With proxy advisors like Glass Lewis recommend now that investors vote against approving Musk’s salary, the result of the 13 June Annual Meeting proves tighter than expected.
A vote of confidence in his new AI strategy from someone like Huang could boost his chances. Few businessmen are as respected as Huang, who founded Nvidia and steered its exponential growth in recent years thanks to a prescient bet on repurposing graphics processing units to train AI models like OpenAI’s. flagship GPT-4o.
Musk and Tesla are swallowing Nvidia AI chips at record speed
Huang praised the twelfth and the latest version of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) software, which abandons the previous approach of hard-coding commands in computer language and instead relies solely on an AI-powered neural network.
“It learns by watching videos,” Huang said. “This technology is very similar to the technology of large language models, but it requires a huge training facility and the reason is that the data rate of videos, the amount of data, is so high. So high.”
However, Huang also knows how important Tesla is as a customer. Musk is a insatiable customer of Nvidia’s AI training chips, increasing its computing capacity in the First quarter in the last three months of last year.
During this period, Tesla has spent a staggering $1 billion to build out its AI infrastructure, and that’s just the beginning. Tesla predicts that its computing capacity, equivalent to 35,000 GPU clusters, will increase to 85,000 by the end of the year. By then, the company could have spent $10 billion.
In order to afford such investments, Musk is willing to use almost any means to cut costs elsewhere – and this at a time when the company’s automotive business must continue to offer incentives that reduce margins to prevent sales from collapsing.
He has already laid off thousands of employees, fired the team behind its industry-leading Supercharger network and abandoned plans for investments in completely new assembly lines because it is an upcoming entry-level model for $25,000, which will probably be a Model 3 hatchback.
But if Tesla can maintain its leadership position in the electric car industry – and Musk earns $55 billion more in the process – the sacrifices may not have been in vain.