SANTA CLARA, CA — In a harrowing sign of the ongoing GPU shortage, Nvidia’s head of automotive Xinzhou Wu was reportedly seen wrestling data center executives for a lone RTX 4090 “training crumb” in the company’s now infamous server cage deathmatch arena, sources confirmed Wednesday.

“Once, I tried to requisition four H100s for a Mercedes ADAS demo, but the AI team snuck in at night and replaced them with a 2005 Dell desktop,” Wu recalled tearfully, clutching a single fried memory stick. “Jensen told us, ‘May the compute go to those who thirst for trillion-dollar TAMs,’ and then locked us in a room with one functioning GPU and a plastic cutlass.”

According to insiders, priorities at Nvidia are determined through an elaborate system of weighted rock-paper-scissors, ROI PowerPoints, and ceremonial offers to the sacred wafer gods. “I thought we were all on the same team, but every time I blink someone from LLM R&D is siphoning off my inference chips to play Fortnite at 240 FPS,” lamented one unnamed automotive engineer. “Last week, our lunchroom was converted into a GPU swap meet.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang issued a statement Thursday: “At Nvidia, we believe fierce internal competition breeds innovation. Whoever emerges victorious from the weekly bloodsport gets double RAM for the quarter. That’s just the AI way.”

Meanwhile, other automakers are reportedly reconsidering their partnership strategies after discovering that the ‘open platform’ simply means ‘bring your own hardware.’

In related news, Elon Musk was spotted outside Nvidia HQ asking if he can “just borrow a couple teraflops real quick.”