Electric vehicle manufacturer and developer of other smart cars Tesla is discussing with South Korean SK Hynix a possible order of enterprise-class SSDs worth ₩1 trillion (about $725 million), The Korea Economic Daily reports.
Solidigm, a subsidiary of SK hynix, notes that without capacious and fast SSDs, working with AI is impossible. It is assumed that Tesla needs such a large purchase of SSDs precisely for the development of AI infrastructure. The company is about to launch an AI cluster of 50 thousand NVIDIA H100. It also has its own AI supercomputer, Dojo, and overall capital expenditures for the year this year are expected to exceed $11 billion. A significant portion of this will go towards AI data centers.
As the Blocks&Files resource clarifies, several vendors are suppliers of All-Flash storage systems for both systems. In this case, apparently, the purchase of QLC drives D5-P5336 with a capacity of 61.44 TB is underway. For the specified amount you can purchase about 100–200 thousand drives with a total capacity of 10 EB – the specific values will depend on the size of the discount, and with such a large purchase there will definitely be one.
Image Source: Tesla
Last week, SK hynix said it nearly doubled its profit in the third quarter. SK Hynix intends to increase investments in chips related to AI technologies – SSD and HBM. It is expected that demand for them will be very high next year. The company ignores the concerns of industry experts who predict a “winter” in demand for memory chips. On the contrary, the company expects a shortage of memory supplies for AI accelerators due to the huge demand for related products.