When it comes to figuring out who actually builds the best AI hardware, most investors are guessing. Elon Musk isn’t. As CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX, he oversees two of the most compute-hungry companies on the planet — Tesla trains its self-driving systems on enormous volumes of driving footage, and SpaceX owns xAI, the maker of the Grok language model. When someone running that much infrastructure states a preference, it’s worth listening.
On SpaceX’s most recent earnings call, Musk didn’t hedge. He said the company would build exclusively on Nvidia going forward, pointing to the upcoming Vera Rubin architecture as the reason: in his words, it’s simply the best AI computer available, and SpaceX values its close partnership with Nvidia enough to go all-in.
Why Rubin has him convinced
The technical case behind that statement is substantial. Compared to Nvidia’s current Blackwell architecture, Rubin is expected to cut the cost of AI inference per token by roughly tenfold and reduce the number of GPUs required to train a model by about fourfold. In practice, companies probably won’t buy fewer chips — they’ll get more computing power for the same footprint, driving down the cost of each unit of AI work. With Rubin chips now in production and shipping soon, that efficiency gain could translate into another leg of revenue growth for Nvidia.
The numbers echo Musk’s confidence
Musk’s endorsement lines up with what’s showing up in both companies’ financial results. In their latest quarters, AMD grew total revenue 50% year-over-year, with data center revenue up 107% — strong growth by most standards. Nvidia beat those numbers on every measure, posting 106% total revenue growth and 117% growth in data center revenue.
And despite outgrowing its rival, Nvidia is the cheaper stock: AMD trades at nearly three times Nvidia’s forward price-to-earnings ratio, a gap that holds even when using 2027 earnings estimates instead of current-year figures.
The takeaway
It’s rare to find a company outperforming its closest competitor on growth, technology, and customer sentiment while trading at a steep valuation discount — but that’s the situation Nvidia and AMD investors face right now. When one of the industry’s most demanding infrastructure buyers calls the choice “pretty definitive,” and the financials back him up, it’s a hard signal to ignore.
