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It seems even billionaires have to beg for the most coveted items in the world. Oracle (ORCL+0.93%) co-founder Larry Ellison says he spent a dinner “begging” for more of Nvidia’s (NVDA+3.10%) artificial intelligence chips.
Over dinner with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang, Ellison said he and Elon Musk, the wealthiest person in the world, were “begging Jensen for GPUs,” or graphics processing units, which power some of the world’s most advanced large language models.
“Please take our money. No, no take more of it. We need you to take more of our money. Please,” Ellison said during an Oracle investor event last week, Barrons reported. “It went okay. It worked.”
During Nvidia’s earnings call in August, Huang said demand for the chipmaker’s highly-anticipated Blackwell chips “is well above supply,” and added that it expects to “ship several billion dollars in Blackwell revenue” in the fourth quarter. Last week, however, Huang said shortages of its latest generation chips have customers feeling “tense.”
Meanwhile, Ellison’s net worth has soared amid the AI boom, as Oracle shares drive higher due to its cloud businesses. Ellison owns just under 40% of Oracle’s outstanding stock, according to Forbes, which has climbed almost 61% so far this year. The Oracle chairman and chief technology officer’s real-time net worth is $197.7 billion, according to Forbes — putting him about $7 billion behind Bezos’s real-time net worth of $204.4 billion.
“As Cloud Services became Oracle’s largest business, both our operating income and earnings per share growth accelerated,” Oracle chief executive, Safra Catz, said in a statement last week after Oracle beat earnings expectations for the first quarter.
Meanwhile, Ellison said the company has 162 cloud data centers, either in operation or under construction, around the world. “The largest of these datacenters is 800 megawatts and will contain acres of NVIDIA GPU Clusters for training large scale AI models,” Ellison said.