Tech Titans Dine and Discuss: Musk and Ellison's GPU Request to Nvidia's CEO

Elon Musk and Larry Ellison begged Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang for AI GPUs at dinner

During the company's latest earnings call, Oracle founder Larry Ellison admitted (via Barron's) that he had to beg Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to supply his company with its latest GPUs. "In Nobu Palo Alto, I went to dinner with Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and I would describe the dinner as me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs. Please take our money; no, take more of it. You're not taking enough of it; we need you to take more of our money, please," Ellison said during the call. "It went okay; it worked." It looks like this dinner was very productive indeed and that it was money well spent for Ellison and Oracle. The company recently announced that it will create a Zettascale AI supercluster composed of 131,072 Nvidia GB200 NVL72 Blackwell GPUs that delivers 2.4 ZettaFLOPS of AI performance -- more powerful than Musk and xAI's Memphis Supercluster, which currently has 100,000 Nvidia H100 AI GPUs. Oracle's AI plans demand an incredible amount of power, which is also why the company has already secured permits to build three modular nuclear reactors to deliver the electrical needs of its facilities. However, since deploying nuclear reactors to data centers will likely take several years, the company could, in the meantime, follow Musk's lead and use massive mobile generators to boost local power supply if needed. Despite being smaller than other big tech companies that offer data center services, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has a distinct advantage over these giants. According to Barron's report, OCI provides better flexibility and can meet specific requirements that some customers demand. It can even provide offline servers that run on its own networking infrastructure to maximize security for the most demanding clients. But despite its size, Oracle is pushing its investments in AI. Ellison says that frontier AI models coming in the next three years will cost $100 billion to train, echoing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's thoughts on the matter. And it seems that OCI wants to become one of the leaders in AI processing. "Someone's going to be better at this than anybody else, and multiple people are trying, and there is a race," said Ellison during the call. He then added later, "Getting there first is a big deal."

Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, and Jensen Huang had dinner: both 'begging Jensen for GPUs'

Oracle CTO Larry Ellison recently had dinner with SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as well as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, with Ellison saying both he and Elon were "begging" Jensen for GPUs. Check it out: Ellison said: "I went to dinner with Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, and I would describe the dinner as Oracle and me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs. Please take our money... no no, take more of it. You're not taking eough. We need you to take more of our money, please". It was recently revealed that Oracle would be spending over $100 billion on 2000+ data centers in the future, with 130,000+ of NVIDIA's new Blackwell AI GPUs powering its new AI supercluster, with the company talking about requiring 3 nuclear power plants just to power the supercluster. Impressive stuff from Oracle, and now we know (from the horse's mouth, too) that they're (not just Oracle, but Elon, too) "begging" Jensen for GPUs. Everyone needs to go to Uncle Jensen for their AI GPU hardware, with NVIDIA sitting (very) pretty in the AI business. NVIDIA can't have enough of its AI GPUs -- Hopper H100 and H200, Blackwell B100 and B200 -- out of TSMC, which is strapped to the limits making as many chips as it can. Oracle wants them, Elon wants them, Meta wants them, OpenAI wants them, Microsoft wants them, everyone wants NVIDIA's leading AI hardware, and now we're hearing that they're begging for them.