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Elon Musk and Warren Buffett Squabble Over Solar In Nevada
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway owns NV Energy, the largest utility company in Nevada. NV Energy has recently pressured the Nevada PUC to slash the amount it must pay residential solar customers for electricity from rooftop solar arrays. Elon Musk is not happy.
Warren Buffett’s company Berkshire Hathaway owns NV Energy, Nevada’s largest electric utility. Part of Tesla Motors’ agreement with the State of Nevada regarding the Gigafactory is a provision that guarantees the factory to receive discounted electricity rates for 8 years. However that discount will result in a $1.50 per year increase to existing NV Energy customers, according to the Las Vegas Sun.
Elon Musk has a major role in SolarCity, the rooftop solar company that specializes in helping residential customers obtain rooftop solar systems for their homes. In Nevada, those homeowners were able to sell any excess electricity back to NV Energy through a process known as net metering. The reimbursement rate was set at 11 cents per kilowatt. That extra money helped fuel a boom in residential rooftop solar with SolarCity leading the way.
But recently, under heavy pressure from NV Energy, the Nevada Public Utilities commission slashed the rate to just 2.6 cents per kilowatt. The rooftop solar companies screamed that the move would eviscerate the residential solar industry in the state. SolarCity shut down its operation in Nevada and laid off hundreds of employees.
Warren Buffett told CNBC on Monday that it is ridiculous for NV Energy to pay rooftop solar customers 11 cents per kilowatt when the company’s base cost of electricity from conventional operations is just 5 cents per kilowatt. He says it is unfair for 1,000,000 customers who don’t have rooftop solar to subsidize the 17,000 or so who do. He says Elon Musk has called and spoken to him about the situation.
“He was unhappy,” Buffett said of Musk. Then he added, “He’s being subsidized with his battery plant big time.” Is that really true? The battery factory Buffett is referring to is the Tesla Gigafactory, which has been designed from the start to be net zero. That means it will generate more electricity every year than it uses. Net zero does not mean it will never draw power from the electrical grid. It means it will put more back into the grid than it uses over the course of a year. There is no information available on how the new rules from the Nevada Public Utilities commission may impact Tesla.
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In order to qualify for the subsidies, Tesla must prove it is hiring a certain percentage of Nevada natives to build and operate the Gigafactory. Tesla has agreed to provide money and other resources to expand schools, police, and fire services in the area. It is also acting as a magnet for other industries to move to what was previously an undeveloped desert.
Musk always likes to remind people that the $1.3 billion Tesla is receiving in incentives amount to only a small discount compared to the size of the economic benefits the project is conferring on the area. “It makes sense that if something is the biggest thing on Earth, it’s probably going to have incentives that are big in the absolute, but small in relative terms,” Musk says
Warren Buffett likes to say that Berkshire Hathaway is strongly committed to reducing global carbon emissions. But he, like the Koch Brothers, is heavily invested in fossil fuels. According to ThinkProgress, he wrote in his annual letter to investors recently, “Last year, BHE [Berkshire Hathaway Energy] made major commitments to the future development of renewables in support of the Paris Climate Change Conference.”
That may be true, but last year it also nearly doubled its position in Phillips 66 and boosted its investment in Suncor position by nearly seven million shares to 30 million shares, an investment now worth approximately $1.1 billion. Suncor is the Canadian company that seeks to develop the Alberta tar sands, the dirtiest source of petroleum on the planet.
Buffett may be one of the smartest investors in the history of the planet, but he is no leader on climate change issues the way Musk is. His letter to investors had this paragraph: "As a citizen, you may understandably find climate change keeping you up nights. As a homeowner in a low-lying area, you may wish to consider moving. But when you are thinking only as a shareholder of a major insurer, climate change should not be on your list of worries."
ThinkProgress labels coastal flooding as a potential trillion dollar liability. Berkshire Hathaway is one of the largest companies in flood insurance and therefore has a huge potential risk from rising sea levels.
Photo credit: CNBC
Elon Musk
Tesla confirms that work on Dojo 3 has officially resumed
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo 3,” Elon Musk wrote in a post on X.
Tesla has restarted work on its Dojo 3 initiative, its in-house AI training supercomputer, now that its AI5 chip design has reached a stable stage.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed the update in a recent post on X.
Tesla’s Dojo 3 initiative restarted
In a post on X, Musk said that with the AI5 chip design now “in good shape,” Tesla will resume work on Dojo 3. He added that Tesla is hiring engineers interested in working on what he expects will become the highest-volume AI chips in the world.
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3. If you’re interested in working on what will be the highest volume chips in the world, send a note to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with 3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved,” Musk wrote in his post on X.
Musk’s comment followed a series of recent posts outlining Tesla’s broader AI chip roadmap. In another update, he stated that Tesla’s AI4 chip alone would achieve self-driving safety levels well above human drivers, AI5 would make vehicles “almost perfect” while significantly enhancing Optimus, and AI6 would be focused on Optimus and data center applications.
Musk then highlighted that AI7/Dojo 3 will be designed to support space-based AI compute.
Tesla’s AI roadmap
Musk’s latest comments helped resolve some confusion that emerged last year about Project Dojo’s future. At the time, Musk stated on X that Tesla was stepping back from Dojo because it did not make sense to split resources across multiple AI chip architectures.
He suggested that clustering large numbers of Tesla AI5 and AI6 chips for training could effectively serve the same purpose as a dedicated Dojo successor. “In a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips on a board, whether for inference or training, simply to reduce network cabling complexity & cost by a few orders of magnitude,” Musk wrote at the time.
Musk later reinforced that idea by responding positively to an X post stating that Tesla’s AI6 chip would effectively be the new Dojo. Considering his recent updates on X, however, it appears that Tesla will be using AI7, not AI6, as its dedicated Dojo successor. The CEO did state that Tesla’s AI7, AI8, and AI9 chips will be developed in short, nine-month cycles, so Dojo’s deployment might actually be sooner than expected.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s xAI brings 1GW Colossus 2 AI training cluster online
Elon Musk shared his update in a recent post on social media platform X.
xAI has brought its Colossus 2 supercomputer online, making it the first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster in the world, and it’s about to get even bigger in a few months.
Elon Musk shared his update in a recent post on social media platform X.
Colossus 2 goes live
The Colossus 2 supercomputer, together with its predecessor, Colossus 1, are used by xAI to primarily train and refine the company’s Grok large language model. In a post on X, Musk stated that Colossus 2 is already operational, making it the first gigawatt training cluster in the world.
But what’s even more remarkable is that it would be upgraded to 1.5 GW of power in April. Even in its current iteration, however, the Colossus 2 supercomputer already exceeds the peak demand of San Francisco.
Commentary from users of the social media platform highlighted the speed of execution behind the project. Colossus 1 went from site preparation to full operation in 122 days, while Colossus 2 went live by crossing the 1-GW barrier and is targeting a total capacity of roughly 2 GW. This far exceeds the speed of xAI’s primary rivals.
Funding fuels rapid expansion
xAI’s Colossus 2 launch follows xAI’s recently closed, upsized $20 billion Series E funding round, which exceeded its initial $15 billion target. The company said the capital will be used to accelerate infrastructure scaling and AI product development.
The round attracted a broad group of investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group. Strategic partners NVIDIA and Cisco also continued their support, helping xAI build what it describes as the world’s largest GPU clusters.
xAI said the funding will accelerate its infrastructure buildout, enable rapid deployment of AI products to billions of users, and support research tied to its mission of understanding the universe. The company noted that its Colossus 1 and 2 systems now represent more than one million H100 GPU equivalents, alongside recent releases including the Grok 4 series, Grok Voice, and Grok Imagine. Training is also already underway for its next flagship model, Grok 5.
Elon Musk
Tesla AI5 chip nears completion, Elon Musk teases 9-month development cadence
The Tesla CEO shared his recent insights in a post on social media platform X.
Tesla’s next-generation AI5 chip is nearly complete, and work on its successor is already underway, as per a recent update from Elon Musk.
The Tesla CEO shared his recent insights in a post on social media platform X.
Musk details AI chip roadmap
In his post, Elon Musk stated that Tesla’s AI5 chip design is “almost done,” while AI6 has already entered early development. Musk added that Tesla plans to continue iterating rapidly, with AI7, AI8, AI9, and future generations targeting a nine-month design cycle.
He also noted that Tesla’s in-house chips could become the highest-volume AI processors in the world. Musk framed his update as a recruiting message, encouraging engineers to join Tesla’s AI and chip development teams.
Tesla community member Herbert Ong highlighted the strategic importance of the timeline, noting that faster chip cycles enable quicker learning, faster iteration, and a compounding advantage in AI and autonomy that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to close.
AI5 manufacturing takes shape
Musk’s comments align with earlier reporting on AI5’s production plans. In December, it was reported that Samsung is preparing to manufacture Tesla’s AI5 chip, accelerating hiring for experienced engineers to support U.S. production and address complex foundry challenges.
Samsung is one of two suppliers selected for AI5, alongside TSMC. The companies are expected to produce different versions of the AI5 chip, with TSMC reportedly using a 3nm process and Samsung using a 2nm process.
Musk has previously stated that while different foundries translate chip designs into physical silicon in different ways, the goal is for both versions of the Tesla AI5 chip to operate identically. AI5 will succeed Tesla’s current AI4 hardware, formerly known as Hardware 4, and is expected to support the company’s Full Self-Driving system as well as other AI-driven efforts, including Optimus.
Tesla confirms that work on Dojo 3 has officially resumed
Elon Musk’s xAI brings 1GW Colossus 2 AI training cluster online
