Even billionaires find themselves pleading for the world’s most sought-after items. Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison revealed that he and Elon Musk spent an entire dinner “begging” for AI chips allotment from Nvidia.
During a dinner with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Ellison shared that he and Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, were “begging Jensen for GPUs,” the graphics processing units that fuel some of the most sophisticated large language models.
Ellison recounted at an Oracle investor event last week, as reported by Barrons, “We urged him, ‘Please accept our money. No, take even more! We need you to take more of our funds. Please.'” He concluded, “It went well. It was successful.”
On Nvidia’s August earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang mentioned that demand for the company’s much-anticipated Blackwell chips “far exceeds supply,” and projected “several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue” for the fourth quarter.
However, just last week, Huang acknowledged that shortages of the latest generation of chips have left customers feeling “tense.”
Ellison’s fortune has surged alongside the AI boom, with Oracle shares rising thanks to the growth of its cloud business.
According to Forbes, Ellison holds just under 40% of Oracle’s outstanding stock, which has jumped nearly 61% this year.
As Oracle’s chairman and chief technology officer, his current net worth stands at $197.7 billion, placing him roughly $7 billion behind Jeff Bezos, whose real-time net worth is $204.4 billion, as reported by Forbes.
“With Cloud Services now Oracle’s largest business, we’ve seen accelerated growth in both operating income and earnings per share,” Oracle CEO Safra Catz stated last week after the company exceeded first-quarter earnings expectations.
Ellison added that Oracle currently operates, or is building, 162 cloud data centers globally. He highlighted that “the largest of these data centers spans 800 megawatts and will house extensive NVIDIA GPU clusters to train large-scale AI models.”
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