Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has previously praised Elon Musk for his contribution in the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), saying he’s doing just the right things. In a recent podcast with Joe Rogan, Huang again commended the Tesla CEO, recounting an episode when he was the sole early buyer of the DGX-1 AI supercomputer in 2016. Huang further said that later he personally delivered the machine to X (formerly Twitter) owner in a small room that turned out to be OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT.“When I announced this thing, nobody in the world wanted it. I had no purchase orders—not one. Nobody wanted to buy it. Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon. He was at the event, and we were doing a fireside chat about the future of self-driving cars,” he told Rogan. However, the excitement was quickly dampened when Musk told him that he has a non-profit company.“And he goes, ‘You know what? I have a company that could really use this.’ And I said, ‘Wow, my first customer.’ I was pretty excited about it. And he goes, ‘Yeah, we have this company. It’s a non-profit company’,” Huang said, recounting the moment during a fireside chat.Huang had invested billions building the system, which cost $300,000 per unit. He joked that the chances of a nonprofit being able to pay for it were “approximately zero.” Musk then clarified that the nonprofit was an AI company that “could really use one of these supercomputers.”

How Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang came to know about OpenAI

The eventual delivery of that initial supercomputer led to the revelation of OpenAI. Huang ultimately built one unit for Nvidia’s internal use and personally delivered the second one to Musk in San Francisco in 2016.“So I picked it up. I built the first one for ourselves—we’re using it inside the company. I boxed one up, drove it up to San Francisco, and delivered it to Elon in 2016. I walked up to the second floor, where they were all kind of crammed into a room smaller than this place here, and that place turned out to be OpenAI,” he revealed.This moment purportedly marked a turning point for Nvidia’s AI hardware ambitions, as the DGX-1, which is powered by eight Pascal GPUs, enabled OpenAI’s foundational research.Earlier this year, Musk shared a ‘throwback’ post from 2016. Originally a photo showing Huang handing over the DGX-1, it has been transformed into a video using AI. Musk reshared the AI-generated video, essentially grabbing the opportunity to promote a new feature in Grok AI chatbot that allows people to convert a photo into a video.“Jensen delivering the first AI-optimized GPU to OpenAI in 2016,” said Musk in the post on X in which Huang is seen unpacking a GPU.