Leaked excerpts from SpaceX's confidentially filed $1.75 trillion S-1 form shed some light on the company's business plans, which includes plans for it to build its own GPUs. The listing notes its intent to invest billions in production of some of the processors it needs internally as it does not have long-term supply agreements with its silicon suppliers. Interestingly, the silicon to be produced in-house is said to be GPUs, not specialized ASICs for AI acceleration, according to Reuters. However, the naming convention is still up for debate. The news comes on the heels of yesterday's blockbuster announcement that Musk will use Intel's 14A process node in its new TeraFab chipmaking venture, with SpaceX managing the manufacturing facilities.
The S-1 form seen by Reuters mentions 'manufacturing our own GPUs' as one of the reasons of the 'substantial capital expenditures' the company will incur in the future as it appears to lack ' long-term contracts with many of our direct chip suppliers.' While the fact that SpaceX will build and operate its own high-volume semiconductor manufacturing facility to produce silicon developed at Tesla was confirmed by Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX, last night, the firm's plans to build its 'own GPUs' seems like something new.
Reuters recons that different companies name their AI accelerators differently. While AMD and Nvidia explicitly call them 'GPUs,' Google calls its AI accelerators 'TPUs,' Microsoft calls its Maia devices 'accelerators,' while SambaNova calls its AI chips 'RDUs.' Most of hyperscale cloud service providers and independent hardware vendors (IHVs) call their AI accelerators application specific integrated circuits, or ASICs. Since SpaceX does not clearly mention AI ASICs developed by Tesla, Reuters believes that SpaceX intends to design and produce something they call their 'own GPUs,' which would mean something different from Tesla's AI-series processors.
We have no idea whether SpaceX — or its xAI division — has the capability to design its own sophisticated custom silicon that would compete against AI GPUs/accelerators from AMD, Nvidia, Rebellions, or SambaNova. However, Elon Musk himself referred to Tesla's AI5 processor as a 'GPU' even though this chip cannot process computer graphics (at least not in a traditional way) due to a lack of special-purpose hardware.
"With the AI5, we we deleted the legacy GPU, or the traditional GPU, which is in AI4, but AI5 does not have the legacy GPU because it basically is a GPU," Musk said in a earnings conference call. "We also deleted the image signal processor. There is a long list of delitions that are very important."
Given the inconsistent naming of its AI accelerators at Tesla — mostly because they are aimed at very specific workloads — it is hard to verify whether SpaceX means producing Tesla's AI5 and/or AI6 hardware, or indeed in-house designed 'GPUs.'
Since the S-1 form has been filed confidentially, Tom's Hardware could not verify its content.
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