Billionaire Elon Musk launched a ballot on social media platform X on Tuesday asking customers whether or not Tesla ought to make investments $5 billion in his artificial intelligence startup xAI.
Board approval and shareholder votes are wanted, Elon Musk stated, including that the ballot is to “check the waters” for a deal.
Tesla didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for
remark, whereas xAI couldn’t be reached.
As of 0234 GMT, greater than 322,000 customers had participated in
the ballot, with 70.2% voting in favour of the funding. The
ballot is about to shut in a day.
Musk based xAI final yr as a challenger to Microsoft
-backed OpenAI and Alphabet’s Google, which
are amongst these main the fierce race for generative AI
dominance.
Earlier within the day, Tesla reported its lowest revenue margin
in additional than 5 years because the U.S. electrical automobile maker minimize
costs to revive demand and elevated spending on AI tasks.
Tesla stated it expects its hardware-related revenue to be
accompanied by the acceleration of AI, software program and fleet-based
income.
Final month, Musk stated Tesla will probably spend between $3
billion and $4 billion on its purchases of chipmaker Nvidia’s
{hardware} this yr.
Of the $10 billion in synthetic intelligence-related
capital expenditure this yr, round half can be inside
spend, he stated.
xAI, which was valued at $24 billion, had raised in Could $6
billion in sequence B funding, backed by buyers together with
Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital.
xAI has already begun coaching its giant language mannequin (LLM) Grok, on what Musk claims, is the world’s strongest AI coaching cluster positioned in Memphis, Tennessee. It has greater than 1,00,000 Nvidia H100 AI chips.
“It is a vital benefit in coaching the world’s strongest AI by each metric by December this yr,” he stated. Earlier he had stated that “Grok is being skilled in Memphis.”