From Nvidia’s record-breaking demand to Elon Musk’s latest factory ambitions, the race to secure the hardware behind artificial intelligence is accelerating fast. FRANCE 24’s Charlotte Lam tells us more.
Jensen Huang, the CEO of the world’s most valuable company, Nvidia, was back in Taiwan at the weekend, celebrating alongside the chipmaker powering its rise, semiconductor foundry TSMC.
In a display of American and Taiwanese innovation, both firms pledged to deepen their partnership and expand production, after Nvidia hit a historic $5 trillion valuation in October and TSMC announced it was building new factories, including in the US. But as production ramps up, politics remain in play. Huang said on Friday that Nvidia has yet to hold talks to sell its high-end Blackwell chips to China, despite recent diplomatic talks.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, who has secured a pay package that could make him the world’s first trillionaire, said his company Tesla may build an AI chip factory to support its robotaxi ambitions.
“It’s like literally the faster you make the chips the faster we send them money, but it’s still not going fast enough,” he told shareholders at the annual company meeting.
“So that’s why I think, as far as I can see, the only option is to go build some… And so, I guess, you’d want to say it’s got to be at least 100,000 wafer starts per month, size fab. And maybe that would be one of 10 in a complex. So it would ultimately be a million wafer starts per month.”
This comes as OpenAI’s Sam Altman urged the White House to extend the Chips Act tax credit to include AI servers, data centres and power grids. Posting on X, he said it was all part of a plan to reindustrialise America “across the entire stack”.
Find out more in this edition of Tech 24.
