HPE lands $1 billion AI server order from Elon Musk | Tom's Hardware

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has reportedly signed a blockbuster deal worth more than $1 billion to build AI servers for Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter). The agreement, said to have been finalized in late 2024, pits HPE ahead of rival suppliers Dell and Supermicro, underlining the growing importance of AI infrastructure in the race to support massive data and compute demands. While HPE has historically lagged behind other industry players in supplying AI-optimized servers, this major contract signals a resounding endorsement of HPE’s technology. Neither HPE nor X has commented publicly on the specifics of the arrangement, but analysts speculate that a large portion of the contract value could go toward acquiring Nvidia GPUs, which often make up about half of a GPU-based server’s cost.

If the servers indeed feature Nvidia’s future Blackwell GPUs—estimated at roughly $50,000 per unit—a $1 billion investment might translate to about 10,000 GPUs, offering an immense amount of processing power to the X platform. Although the precise hardware configuration remains unknown, this would give Elon Musk’s social network formidable performance capabilities, measured potentially in the tens of exaFLOPS and exaTOPS. It’s unclear how exactly X will leverage such a significant computational resource, but the contract stands as a notable milestone both for HPE’s AI server ambitions and for Musk’s broader efforts to transform his newly acquired platform into an AI-driven powerhouse.