Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger visits Elon Musk’s Memphis data center, touts Xeon deployment — praises xAI team for building it “in such a short amount of time”

Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of embattled tech company Intel, praised the xAI team after visiting Elon Musk’s Memphis Supercluster. He posted on X (formerly Twitter) that xAI uses Intel Xeon processors for its AI head node — the dedicated server that manages the entire 100,000-GPU-strong cluster — and that it’s “incredible what’s been built in such a short amount of time!”

After losing over $1.6 billion in its data center and foundry businesses, Intel is struggling. It has also missed the AI bandwagon, especially as its Gaudi 3 AI accelerator still suffers from issues.

On the flip side, Elon Musk has so far spent around $10 billion on AI training hardware this year, allowing his team to set up 100,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs in just 19 days — a process that usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. Although Nvidia powers Elon’s AI processors, he still needs a CPU to direct the AI cluster’s massive processing power. Pat Gelsinger’s post confirms that the xAI team chose Intel Xeon processors to drive their AI head node. Team Blue launched its latest 128-core flagship CPU called Granite Rapids in September 2024, but Gelsinger did not confirm which model the team uses.

The Intel CEO also praised Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Technologies and the current provider of xAI’s head node servers — at least those pictured here. Musk previously purchased systems from Supermicro, but it’s unclear if the Dell servers are used in place of other Supermicro offerings — it is entirely possible that the company chose to use Dell head nodes while continuing to outfit the rest of the data center with Supermicro gear. The use of Dell head nodes will further rumors that Supermicro’s legal issues have pushed xAI to switch suppliers, but that might not be the case.

Aside from exploring xAI’s massive AI cluster, we don’t know if Pat Gelsinger had other reasons for visiting the Memphis data center. Musk plans to double the GPUs on the site to 200,000 shortly, and he even mentioned plans to go as high as 300,000, although it seems that it will be a later phase of expansion. All these additional GPUs will still reportedly be Nvidia AI accelerators and could be Blackwell GPUs, so it’s unlikely that Pat is selling Elon some of Intel’s Gaudi 3 chips.

However, such a massive GPU purchase means that xAI would also need many CPUs, so he might try staying in Musk’s good graces to sell more Xeon chips. After all, even though xAI isn’t buying Intel’s AI chips yet, it still would do the company well if it could move its data center CPUs, helping it recover from its financial troubles revealed in August this year.