Nvidia vs. AMD: Elon Musk Picked a Side on the SpaceX Earnings Call

The GPU market is dominated by a duopoly featuring Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD). Nvidia is shipping Blackwell at enormous scale and ramping up Vera Rubin as the next rack-scale platform. Meanwhile, AMD is selling MI300 systems and lining up its next-generation MI400 accelerators to keep its seat at the table.

Amazon , Alphabet , Microsoft , Oracle , Meta Platforms , Anthropic, and OpenAI are not picking one vendor to supply chips for the artificial intelligence (AI) build-outs. Instead, they are stuffing solutions from both Nvidia and AMD into the same stacks because supply is tight, different workloads require specific architectures, and nobody can afford to sit around and wait.

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This is the backdrop of the AI infrastructure landscape. However, during Space Exploration Technologies ' first earnings call as a public company, Elon Musk stepped into the chip arena and made his preference abundantly obvious.

During SpaceX's second-quarter earnings call, Musk did not leave much room for interpretation. He stated:

[G]oing forward, we've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia. So we're exclusive to Nvidia.

This really isn't a shock to anyone who has watched Tesla over the years. Tesla trains some of its autonomy stack on Nvidia's hardware even while the company works on its own inference chips for robotaxi and Optimus. Musk has previously expressed public admiration for Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, acknowledging that Tesla and SpaceX will continue ordering Nvidia chips at scale. The SpaceX call simply solidified a relationship that already existed.

What is SpaceX doing with Nvidia's chips?

AI chips are not used only for chatbots on Earth. SpaceX is using clusters of GPUs to design orbital data centers, integrate with Starlink operations and Starship mission planning, as well as simulate the same kind of work Tesla is doing with its autonomous vehicles. The near-term buzz is around Starmind, an optimized satellite payload built on Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 system.