Larry Ellison and Elon Musk ‘begged’ Nvidia’s CEO for extra GPUs

At a gathering with analysts final week, billionaire Oracle cofounder and chief expertise officer Larry Ellison advised the viewers that he and world’s-richest-man Elon Musk took Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang out to dinner at Nobu Palo Alto and “begged” Huang to present them extra GPUs.

“I’d describe the dinner as Oracle—me and Elon begging Jensen for GPUs,” Ellison recalled. “Please take our cash. Please take our cash. By the way in which, I obtained dinner. No, no, take extra of it. We want you to take extra of our cash please.” 

The end result was a internet optimistic, mentioned Ellison. “It went okay. I imply, it labored.”

Ellison, whose famed fortune is estimated to be $206 billion, is a distinguished determine within the tech trade and serves as government chairman of enterprise software program agency Oracle. He’s identified for anticipating important technological shifts, together with precisely positioning the $475 billion tech large to reap the advantages of the web in its early days. He has additional solidified the corporate by shifting it to capitalize on the surging want for cloud-based enterprise infrastructure. The corporate has maintained a robust relationship with Nvidia, which controls greater than 80% of the AI chip market, and is the prime alternative for firms engaged on AI.  

Eventually week’s assembly Ellison mentioned the aggressive panorama received’t hinder Oracle’s progress. The only approach of taking a look at it, Ellison replied, is the phrase,“the race goes on.” He likened the present competitors in AI to a Formulation One driving race. 

“You’ve obtained three individuals on the rostrum, however there’s actually sort of one winner,” mentioned Ellison. “Somebody goes to be higher at this than anybody else, and a number of persons are attempting and there’s a race.”

For its half, Oracle is making gargantuan investments in GPU expertise, significantly for AI purposes. The tech large this month introduced its first quarter outcomes for fiscal 2025 and disclosed revenues had been up 7% to $13.3 billion, year-over-year. Earnings had been $2.9 billion. Oracle additionally disclosed that it has 162 cloud datacenters in operation or beneath development world wide and the most important of its datacenters is 800 megawatts and can home “acres of Nvidia GPU clusters” used to coach large-scale AI fashions. Within the first quarter, Oracle signed 42 extra cloud GPU contracts, totaling $3 billion. 

Equally, Tesla, the place Musk serves as CEO, depends on Nvidia GPUs to energy the supercomputers that practice its neural networks for self-driving and assisted driving expertise. 

In line with Ellison, being the primary to construct probably the most succesful neural community on the earth “is an enormous deal.” Given the will to be on the forefront, many executives in AI are begging Huang for GPUs and constructing datacenters, he mentioned. 

“Does anybody know what it prices to construct a frontier mannequin over the following three years?” Ellison was referring to probably the most superior, bleeding-edge AI techniques.

“100 billion,” mentioned Ellison. “That’s going to get you within the recreation.”

“Not lots of people and never a number of firms and never a number of international locations will take part.”

Nvidia and Tesla didn’t instantly reply to Fortune’s request for remark.