Is Tesla Planning To Sell Modular AI Data Center Hardware? (electrek.co) 23
Electrek reports:
Tesla wants to sell modular AI data center hardware, according to a new trademark application for a product called "Megapod." The filing describes a complete, self-contained computing system for AI workloads...
Tesla filed the "Megapod" trademark (serial number 99893717) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month, through its longtime IP counsel. It's an intent-to-use application, meaning Tesla is claiming the name for a product it hasn't launched yet. The goods-and-services description is unusually specific for a trademark. Megapod covers "modular data center hardware systems for artificial intelligence computing, comprised of computer servers, computer hardware for artificial intelligence data processing, networking equipment, power distribution units, and cooling systems." It also covers "self-contained modular computing hardware systems for artificial intelligence workloads," integrated platforms sold as a single unit — an enclosure bundling compute, power distribution, and cooling — and downloadable software to monitor, manage, and optimize those systems.
In plain terms: Tesla wants to sell a turnkey AI data center building block. Not a battery, not a chip on its own, but the full rack-and-room of servers, networking, power, and cooling that AI training and inference run on.
Tesla's offering would have to compete with Nvidia's liquid-cooled, rack-scale systems that simulates a giant GPU, the article points out. But "The bigger issue is that Tesla has no merchant compute-hardware business to build on." Tesla's own AI training cluster, Cortex at Gigafactory Texas, runs on roughly 67,000 Nvidia H100-equivalent GPUs. In other words, Tesla is one of Nvidia's customers, not a competitor selling alternative hardware... Where Tesla does have a real AI-data-center business is power, not compute. Its Megapack and new Megablock energy storage products are selling into AI data centers as grid buffers — Musk's own xAI has bought roughly $1 billion of Megapacks to keep its training runs powered. That energy-storage strength is the one credible thread here. A Megapod that bundles Tesla's power electronics, thermal management, and the enclosure — the "shell" around the chips rather than the chips themselves — would at least sit adjacent to a business Tesla actually runs.
Tesla filed the "Megapod" trademark (serial number 99893717) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month, through its longtime IP counsel. It's an intent-to-use application, meaning Tesla is claiming the name for a product it hasn't launched yet. The goods-and-services description is unusually specific for a trademark. Megapod covers "modular data center hardware systems for artificial intelligence computing, comprised of computer servers, computer hardware for artificial intelligence data processing, networking equipment, power distribution units, and cooling systems." It also covers "self-contained modular computing hardware systems for artificial intelligence workloads," integrated platforms sold as a single unit — an enclosure bundling compute, power distribution, and cooling — and downloadable software to monitor, manage, and optimize those systems.
In plain terms: Tesla wants to sell a turnkey AI data center building block. Not a battery, not a chip on its own, but the full rack-and-room of servers, networking, power, and cooling that AI training and inference run on.
Tesla's offering would have to compete with Nvidia's liquid-cooled, rack-scale systems that simulates a giant GPU, the article points out. But "The bigger issue is that Tesla has no merchant compute-hardware business to build on." Tesla's own AI training cluster, Cortex at Gigafactory Texas, runs on roughly 67,000 Nvidia H100-equivalent GPUs. In other words, Tesla is one of Nvidia's customers, not a competitor selling alternative hardware... Where Tesla does have a real AI-data-center business is power, not compute. Its Megapack and new Megablock energy storage products are selling into AI data centers as grid buffers — Musk's own xAI has bought roughly $1 billion of Megapacks to keep its training runs powered. That energy-storage strength is the one credible thread here. A Megapod that bundles Tesla's power electronics, thermal management, and the enclosure — the "shell" around the chips rather than the chips themselves — would at least sit adjacent to a business Tesla actually runs.
Pivot!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:1, Funny)
They could pivot to reflection pool restoration.
Re: (Score:2)
Foundry business (Score:5, Interesting)
Not surprising. Tesla is its 5th generation (AI5) processor, currently manufactured by Samsung and TSMC. I suppose they imagine there are others that will want to use these for their own purposes. Musk is creating his own supply of chips for SpaceX at his TX Terafab. Having terrestrial customers to absorb some of the supply and provide revenue as that ramps up the obvious thing to do.
Re: Are these ... (Score:2)
So itâ(TM)s a server rack? (Score:1)
No. (Score:4, Insightful)
Muskrat bought a bunch of gpus before the AI bubble really got going because he was preemptively pumping the SpaceX stock by shouting look at me I'm buying all this computer hardware for my AI so you know I'm going to make you rich!
He never did anything with any of it because that wasn't the point. He wasn't building data centers he was scamming investors.
Now he's got stacks and stacks of gpus sitting around gathering dust and to keep the stock price pumped for the time being he needs to make it look like he's going to have a ton of revenue coming in. In practice he's not and he's just going to steal all your 401K money but we're going to get bullshit articles like this because anyone who does real journalism like Patrick Boyle over on YouTube gets fired or demonetized.
If you watch the most recent video from Patrick Boyle and go to the end of the video he explains how the scam works. Initially investors get murdered in by the promise of big fat returns but they can't sell the stock for the first 120 days as part of the buying agreement. Just one of those investors are at the point where they can sell the stock and it's likely to crash the rule changes to NASDAQ for SpaceX stock into safe index funds.
Your 401k will be forced to purchase SpaceX stock for the index funds that were the otherwise be safe investments. You will not have the option of not buying SpaceX stock. Eventually your 401k will be full of SpaceX stock and a variety of other rotten AI bullshit stocks that will collapse eliminating the value of your retirement savings.
When this happens the people who saw it coming will still be screwed because there's nothing they could do about it because the people who didn't see it coming refused to vote for the kind of reforms that are needed. It doesn't matter if you realize you're a crab in a bucket you're still a crab and a bucket and they're going to drag you back down every time you try to get out.
There is 10 trillion dollars in 401ks. If you think the thieves that have already created 1 trillionaire are going to stop and leave that money sitting there you're nuts. That money belongs to them not you. You gave it to them when you kept voting for culture War bullshit instead of boring annoying people like senator Warren who know how to regulate Wall Street
Re: (Score:2)
"Trump Derangement Syndrome and Musk Derangement Syndrome" huh? I don't think we need to bring in the ability to believe those flim-flam artists into this discussion.
Lottery index (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Elon gets away with it since moved faster than regulators who are confused by free markets vs free for all.
You were close but you've forgotten that regulators are, effectively, captured today. There isn't really a free market in late stage capitalism, it's all about the extraction of wealth.
They do have filters (Score:2)
Every one of em will become trillionaires the same way muskrat did, by stealing your retirement
Re: (Score:2)
In the data centre business this newly-invented Megapod(tm) is called a module [wikipedia.org]. My company probably has 30 or more of them, and I've seen this "data centre in a can" concept around for the past 15 years. Doing it in shipping containers was all the rage for a while.
Of course the old ones were not direct-to-chip liquid cooled, but I'm sure the providers of these modules already have that. In any case, this is in no way a new concept -- just, as you say, some shiny branding.
Sounds same as Tiny Corp's ExaBox (Score:2)
https://www.phoronix.com/news/... [phoronix.com]
Well, it's been nearly 20 years ... (Score:1)
Oh, it's got a bunch of GPGPUs in it, not just standard rackmount servers. Well, it's been nearly 2 decades, so I guess they're hoping the people at the patent office don't remember that.