Elon Musk roasted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman for boasting about spending “15 million labour hours” on building the company’s new data center. Suleyman, while comparing the development to the building of the Empire State Building, had said that the famous monument took less than half the time at 7 million labour hours.
“Already our Fairwater datacenter in Atlanta has taken over 15 million labor hours to build, even more once it’s fully finished. For comparison the Empire State Building took 7 million,” Suleyman wrote in a post on X.
Responding to the post, Musk wrote, “Are you sure you’re doing it right?”
Notably, Elon Musk’s xAI had reportedly set up a data center last year with 100,000 liquid cooled NVIDIA H100 graphic processing units (GPUs) in just 19 days that had also drawn praise from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
In a conversation with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley, Huang said, “As far as I know, there’s only one person in the world who could do that; Elon is singular in his understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources; it’s just unbelievable.”
Elon Musk and Microsoft rivalry
Ever since the rise of ChatGPT in late 2022, Musk has criticised the influence of Microsoft in OpenAI. The billionaire has also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI last year that also added Microsoft in November, claiming that backing of the tech giant turned the ChatGPT maker into a “closed source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft.
Musk had surprisingly partnered with Microsoft during the Build 2025 event where the billionaire announced his Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini model on the Azure AI Foundry platform.
In recent months, Musk has started warning Microsoft about the dangers of continuing to back OpenAI, who he claims would “eat Microsoft alive”. Recently, Musk also called Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI “insanely suicidal”.
Meanwhile, the billionaire also plans to serve his own rival to Microsoft with a new company he launched in August called Macrohard. The so called goal for Macrohard has been to replicate the work of Microsoft purely using AI.
“Microsoft do not themselves manufacture any physical hardware, it should be possible to simulate them entirely with AI,” Musk claimed in a post earlier in the year. While not a lot has been publicly available about Musk’s strategy of bringing an AI powered rival to Microsoft, one thing that is certain is that it would have Grok AI at the centre of the effort.
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