Elon Musk has been wowing the world with his achievements in the electric car and rocket industries, but there’s some fresh perspective on how he really gets things done from the world of AI.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, took just 19 days to set up a datacenter, while it normally takes other companies as long as a year to achieve the same result. “As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that. Elon is singular in this understanding of engineering, construction, large systems and marshalling resources. It’s unbelievable,” Jensen Huang said on a podcast.
Elon Musk’s xAI had ordered 100,000 GPUs from NVIDIA to set up a data center. “From the moment the concept to a data center that was ready for NVIDIA to have our gear there, to the moment that we had powered it on, had it all hooked up, and it did its first training — that first part, just building a massive factory that was liquid cooled, energized, and permitted in that short time was done, that is like superhuman,” Huang continued.
Huang also said that Elon Musk had created a crack team of engineers to run xAI. “His engineering team is extraordinary. The software team is great, the networking team is great, the infrastructure team is great. Elon understands (these fields) deeply,” Huang said.
“It’s likely nobody slept for those 19 days,” Huang said. “To put it into perspective, 100,000 GPUs is easily the fastest supercomputer on the planet. A supercomputer that you’d build would normally take 3 years to plan, and then they’d deliver the equipment, and then it takes one year to get it all working. (With Elon), we’re talking about 19 days,” he said.
Now this isn’t the only time Elon Musk has stunned industry watchers with his ability to get unprecedented things done. Musk had created the world’s first viable electric car that went into production, and Tesla is now the most valuable car-maker in the world. Musk had also led the first private company to launching rockets into space with SpaceX, and now has many other firsts to his credit, including landing a rocket booster back on the ground for reuse, and more recently, catching a booster with a pair of mechanized arms. Meanwhile on the social media front, Musk has fired 80 percent of the employees and Twitter, and the company keeps running merrily along in its new avatar of X. There are already several books written about Elon Musk, but his management style — and its extraordinary results — will be continue to be studied for centuries to come.