Nvidia's Jensen Huang praises Elon Musk's efforts at Tesla
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- Jensen Huang had positive words about Tesla's efforts in an interview last week.
- The Nvidia CEO said the EV maker is "far ahead in self-driving cars."
- The support comes weeks before Tesla shareholders are set to vote on Elon Musk's pay package.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave electric vehicle maker Tesla a shoutout during an interview with Yahoo Finance last week.
Huang, whose computer chip company is at the pinnacle of Silicon Valley these days, offered praise when asked about automakers other than Tesla venturing into the self-driving space.
"Tesla is far ahead in self-driving cars, but every single car, someday, will have to have autonomous capability," Huang said in the interview posted to YouTube Thursday.
As CEO of the EV maker, Elon Musk has led company efforts to produce self-driving vehicles. Tesla has promoted its Full Self-Driving technology (FSD) hard in 2024, and halved the monthly price of the software to $99.
But, FSD has been met with questions around its safety — prompting a recent rebrand to FSD (Supervised) — since the beta launched in 2020. Tesla estimated about 400,000 cars in the US have FSD installed.
Huang's support comes at a good time for Musk. Tesla shareholders will hold a vote in June to reinstate his pay package as the top exec, which is valued at $47 billion. A Delaware court voided his compensation in January after a shareholder filed a lawsuit arguing that the package was excessive.
Nvidia artificial intelligence chips are in high demand among tech companies. Customers lining up to buy the Blackwell chips include Google Meta, OpenAI, and more, according to the company.
Musk compared the current arms race happening in AI to a poker game and said Tesla will be betting big with Nvidia in January.
In a post on X, Musk said that Tesla will spend over $500 million on Nvidia's AI chips in 2024.
"The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at least several billion dollars per year at this point," he said in the post.