HPE has secured a deal exceeding $1 billion to build AI servers for the X social platform previously known as Twitter, Bloomberg reports. The company beat out prominent AI server suppliers Dell and Supermicro for the contract. Since the deal is confidential, HPE did not comment to Bloomberg.
The deal was reportedly finalized in late 2024, following a competitive bidding process involving Dell and Supermicro. HPE, historically behind Dell and Supermicro in AI server sales, has ample reason to consider this agreement a significant endorsement of its technology. While $1 billion is a lot of money even by AI industry standards, this is a big win for HPE and a significant loss for Dell and the troubled Supermicro.
Bloomberg does not provide details about the servers HPE will supply to the microblogging platform, but most big companies rely on Nvidia AI GPUs. In general, GPUs are believed to account for half of an AI server's cost, so assuming we are dealing with GPU-based servers, a $1 billion deal would imply $500 million worth of GPUs.
Assuming that HPE and X will get a Blackwell GPU at $50,000 a unit (the actual cost of these GPUs varies), X will get a cluster of AI servers with 10,000 Blackwell GPUs. Such a cluster would offer rather formidable performance: up to 90 FP4 ExaFLOPS and 45 INT8/FP8 ExaTOPS. It remains to be seen how X plans to use this computational superpower. Of course, we are speculating as we do not know what is inside those machines.
Twitter used to buy custom servers from companies like MiTAC (Tyan), Supermicro, and Wiwynn. After Elon Musk acquired Twitter in 2022, the company ceased to buy servers from MiTAC (Tyan) and Wiwynn but retained its business deals with Supermicro. Interestingly, Musk's AI venture xAI contracted Dell to build its Colossus supercomputer for artificial intelligence with 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs.
