Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun (Julien De Rosa/Getty Images)

GP-who?

Just four companies are hoarding tens of billions of dollars worth of Nvidia GPU chips

Each Nvidia H100 can cost up to $40,000, and one big tech company has 350,000 of them.

7/25/24 2:26PM

Meta just announced the release of Llama 3.1, the latest iteration of their open source large language model. The long-awaited, jumbo-sized model has high scores on the same benchmarks that everyone else uses, and the company said it beats OpenAi’s ChatGPT 4o on some tests.

According to the research paper that accompanies the model release, the 405b parameter version of the model (the largest flavor) was trained using up to 16,000 of Nvidia’s popular H100 GPUs . The Nvidia H100 is one of the most expensive, and most coveted pieces of technology powering the current AI boom. Meta appears to have one of the largest hoards of the powerful GPUs.

Of course, the list of companies seeking such powerful chips for AI training is long, and likely includes most large technology companies today, but only a few companies have publicly crowed about how many H100s they have.

The H100 is estimated to cost between $20,000 and $40,000 meaning that Meta used up to $640 million worth of hardware to train the model. And that’s just a small slice of the Nvidia hardware Meta has been stockpiling. Earlier this year, Meta said that it was aiming to have a stash of 350,000 H100s in its AI training infrastructure – which adds up to over $10 billion worth of the specialized Nvidia chips.

Venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz is reportedly hoarding more than 20,000 of the pricey GPUs, which it is renting out to AI startups in exchange for equity, according to The Information.

Tesla has also been collecting H100s. Musk said on an earnings call in April that Tesla wants to have between 35,000 and 85,000 H100s by the end of the year.

But Musk also needs H100s for X and his AI company xAI. This week, Musk boasted on X that xAI’s company’s training cluster is made up of 100,000 H100s.

A tweet from Elon Musk stating that xAI has 100,000 H100 GPUs. — Source: X @elonmusk https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1815325410667749760

Musk was recently sued by Tesla shareholders for allegedly re-directing 12,000 of the H100s intended for the car maker’s AI training infrastructure to xAI instead. When asked about this diversion in yesterday’s Tesla Q2 earnings call, Musk said that the GPUs were sent to xAI because “the Tesla data centers were full. There was no place to actually put them.”

The H100s are in such demand that people are being paid to sneak them into China, to bypass U.S. export controls. You can watch unboxing videos of these graphics cards, and there are even a few for sale on Amazon – including one for $34,749.95 (with free delivery).

OpenAI hasn’t said how many H100s they are sitting on, but The Information reports that the company rents a cluster of processors dedicated to training from Microsoft at a steep discount as part of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI. The training cluster reportedly has the power of 120,000 of Nvidia’s previous gen A100 GPUs, and will be spending $5 billion to rent more training clusters from Oracle over the next two years, according to The Information’s report. OpenAI does appear to have a special relationship with Nvidia — in April, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang “hand-delivered” the first cluster of the company’s next generation H200 GPUs to co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.

A tweet by OpenAI’s Greg Brockman with a photo featuring Brockman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang — Source: X @gbd https://x.com/gdb/status/1783234941842518414

Nvidia declined to comment for this story, and Meta, X, OpenAI, Tesla, and Andreessen Horowitz did not respond to requests for comment.

Jon Keegan3/27/26

Judge blocks Pentagon’s move to blacklist Anthropic

A federal judge in Northern California has granted a preliminary injunction blocking the Pentagon from labeling Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk.

The ruling temporarily prevents the Defense Department from restricting the AI company’s access to federal contracts amid a dispute over its refusal to allow certain military and surveillance uses of its technology. The designation could also have shifted lucrative government work toward competitors, including OpenAI.

Earlier this month, Anthropic, the company behind Claude, sued 17 federal agencies and their heads, alleging the government exceeded its statutory authority.

Rani Molla3/27/26

Report: SpaceX’s record IPO may grant preferential access to retail investors and Tesla shareholders

SpaceX’s impending IPO could raise $40 billion to $80 billion and rank as the largest ever — as well as one of the most unconventional.

The Wall Street Journal reports several ways CEO Elon Musk is considering breaking with IPO norms:

Investors in his other companies, including Tesla, could receive preferential access to shares.
Individual investors may get a third or more of the allocation, far above the typical ~10% mark.
Instead of a traditional road show, Musk wants investors to visit SpaceX facilities in person.

Exclusive | The SpaceX IPO Will Be Just as Unconventional as Musk Himself

Investors in his other companies, including Tesla, could receive preferential access to shares.
Individual investors may get a third or more of the allocation, far above the typical ~10% mark.
Instead of a traditional road show, Musk wants investors to visit SpaceX facilities in person.

Rani Molla3/26/26

Tesla released estimates for Q1 deliveries and they’re lower than analysts expected

Ahead of first-quarter earnings next month, Tesla released its own company-compiled Wall Street consensus estimate for deliveries: 365,645 vehicles. While that’s lower than the 382,000 FactSet consensus estimate, it represents a nearly 9% jump from Q1 2025, when Tesla sold 336,681 vehicles.

Tesla started releasing its own consensus estimates to the public — not just institutional investors — for the first time in Q4 2025. The move was seen as a way to temper investor expectations, as other estimates were too high. Last quarter, Tesla’s compilation was closer to actual numbers, which fell 16% year over year.

The market-implied odds from event contracts suggest 64% of traders think Tesla’s Q1 deliveries will be more than 350,000, 44% think it will be higher than 360,000, and just 21% have it at higher than 370,000.

(Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.)

The toughest AI benchmark just got a whole lot tougher

ARC-AGI-3 is the latest version of a clever benchmark that challenges AI models to solve mini video games with no written instructions.

Jon Keegan3/26/26

Rani Molla3/26/26

The US leads the world in robotaxi deployments

Every day it seems another robotaxi launches somewhere in the world. But most of them are in the US.

Of the 171 active robotaxi deployments globally, 69 — or 40% — are in the US, according to a new report from the Bank of America Institute. China, the next largest market, accounts for 24% of deployments.

Most of those deployments are still in testing or early commercial stages. Only 10 US cities currently have fully commercial robotaxi operations, defined as services that operate on public roads, carry paying passengers, run fully driverless without a safety driver, and function all day in any weather.

For now, that effectively refers to Alphabet’s Waymo, which operates commercially in Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix, San Antonio, and the San Francisco Bay Area. That definition excludes competitors like Tesla, whose Robotaxi service uses safety monitors, and Amazon’s Zoox, which has yet to charge customers for rides.