Elon Musk buys 10,000 GPUs for Twitter AI project

Elon Musk has reportedly purchased 10,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) for a Twitter artificial intelligence (AI) project.

It is unclear from reports whether Musk has bought the GPUs himself, on done so via Twitter.

Sources told Business Insider that Musk is working on a large language model (LLM) to train on vast amounts of text data to learn patterns. An end goal for this has not yet been shared.

The investment in GPUs is estimated to be in the tens of millions of dollars. A GPU provider wasn’t named.

The GPUs will likely be housed in one of Twitter’s two data centers: Atlanta, or Oregon. The company previously had three data centers, but Musk closed the Sacramento facility on Christmas Eve in 2022.

The decision to purchase the GPUs is somewhat unexpected, after Musk signed an open letter warning about the dangers of AI last month, saying that ‘human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity’ and calling for a pause on the development of AI systems.

Last month, Musk started assembling a team to focus on the creation of a ‘non-woke’ version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Recruits include Igor Babuschkin who recently left Alphabet’s DeepMind AI division. Musk has publicly criticized OpenAI products for being too ‘woke.’ Musk helped cofound OpenAI in 2015 before leaving in 2018.

Musk took over Twitter in April 2022. Since then, the company has experienced several issues, including mass layoffs in November. This year alone, Twitter has experienced a series of outages and, as of March, was reportedly $70m behind on payments to Amazon Web Services. Data Center Dynamics