From HPC Wire, September 12:
During a recent earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, summed up the shortage of Nvidia enterprise GPUs in a few sentences.
“We’re using a lot of Nvidia hardware. We’ll… take Nvidia hardware as fast as Nvidia will deliver it to us.” Musk said.
He later added: “I don’t know if they could deliver us enough GPUs…but they can’t. They’ve got so many customers.”
Musk is just one person in a giant line of customers waiting for Nvidia’s GPUs for AI.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that ChatGPT was the iPhone moment for AI. The Nvidia GPU is the iPhone of enterprise hardware.
Nvidia isn’t prioritizing its limited supply of red-hot GPUs to customers only with wads of cash. Nvidia screens customers for plan, purpose, and workloads before supplying GPUs.
The goal is to ensure the workloads align with the GPU’s capabilities and that the customer is a good steward of Nvidia’s hardware.
Customers need to meet specific Nvidia guidelines to be considered for a GPU, said Colette Kress, the chief financial officer at Nvidia, during an analyst meeting at the Citi Global Technology Conference this week. Here are some of those:
Do you have a PO or purchase order?
That’s Nvidia’s polite way of saying, “Show me the money.”Kress said that a PO provides insight into the company’s plans and Nvidia’s role in those plans. She said the PO helps Nvidia start planning for the customer from its end.
“We worked with many large companies for many years. They do help us understand the planning process and work, and that is one piece of our process. It says ‘help us in terms of that'” Kress said.
Intel’s chief financial officer, Dave Zinsner, has said that understanding a customer’s plans opens the door to upselling more products — software or infrastructure — to meet specific requirements.
Nvidia also sells its AI software, CPUs, and network hardware alongside its GPUs.
Are you ready to receive the GPU?
Nvidia wants to know about the computing setup to handle the superhot speeds of GPUs and cooling requirements to handle the heat wave caused by the H100s....
....MUCH MORE
