Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, announced that Samsung Electronics and Taiwan’s TSMC will collaborate on developing Tesla’s AI5 autonomous driving chip.
During Tesla’s third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, Musk said, according to Bloomberg and CNBC, that the company’s explicit goal is to oversupply AI5 chips.
He clarified his earlier comments by adding that both TSMC and Samsung will initially focus on AI5 production.
The AI5 chip, first unveiled at last year’s Tesla shareholder meeting, is the latest iteration of Tesla’s autopilot hardware, designed to process signals essential to autonomous driving.
In July, Musk revealed that Tesla would entrust Samsung with the production of the next-generation AI6 chip, part of a contract valued at about 16.5 billion USD between the two companies.
While Musk had previously mentioned that TSMC would manufacture the AI5 chips, he has now confirmed that Samsung will also participate in their production.
He noted that Tesla’s position as the sole customer for the AI5 allows chip designers to focus entirely on the company’s requirements and remove outdated components that could impede performance.
Tesla also announced that it has secured computing power equivalent to 81,000 NVIDIA H100 chips.
Musk emphasized that Tesla will continue to use NVIDIA’s GPUs for model training, noting that the company is not seeking to replace NVIDIA but to use both technologies in parallel.
Tesla previously used NVIDIA’s autonomous driving chips but shifted to its in-house processors in 2019.