Musk, Partnering With Samsung, Says “Tesla Chip Design Almost Finished, Aiming for World’s Largest Production”

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\r\n[The Financial News] As the design of Tesla’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chip, “AI5,” enters its final phase, analysts say this is a positive signal for Samsung Electronics’ foundry (contract manufacturing) business.
On the 18th (local time), Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, said on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), “The AI5 chip design is almost complete,” adding, “Design work on the Tesla AI6 chip has also entered the early stages.” He continued, “Follow-up chips such as the AI7 chip, the Tesla AI8 chip series, and AI9 will be rolled out sequentially,” and noted, “We are aiming to shorten the chip design cycle to nine months.”
This means Tesla plans to drastically reduce the timeline from the roughly three years it took to develop and mass-produce the AI3 and AI4 chips, signaling a much more aggressive AI chip roadmap. Musk also stressed that Tesla’s AI chips “will, without question, achieve the world’s highest production volume.”
Completion of the AI5 design is widely seen as a potential starting gun for an improvement in Samsung Electronics’ foundry performance. Tesla signed a semiconductor supply contract worth about 23 trillion won with Samsung Electronics in July last year. Samsung Electronics is expected to manufacture Tesla’s AI chips using its cutting-edge 2–3 nanometer (nm, one-billionth of a meter) processes, including at the Samsung Semiconductor Taylor Plant in the State of Texas, which is scheduled to begin operations this year.
Industry observers predict that part of the AI5 volume and the Tesla AI6 chip will likely become core products manufactured at the Samsung Semiconductor Taylor Plant. In an earnings call last October, Musk said, “Both Samsung Electronics and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) will work on AI5,” thereby officially confirming Samsung Electronics’ participation in production.
The market had initially expected that the bulk of AI5 orders would go to Taiwan’s TSMC, but with Musk publicly committing to “the world’s largest production volume” and a “nine-month design cycle,” expectations are growing that the volume to be handled by Samsung Electronics could also expand.
Lee Jae-yong, chairman of Samsung Electronics, is reported to have met with CEO Musk during a business trip to the United States late last year to discuss broad technological cooperation, including in semiconductors. Tesla’s AI-series chips are high-performance system semiconductors used in autonomous vehicles, humanoid robots, and the operation of large-scale AI models.
#SamsungElectronics #Tesla #AI5 #foundry #TaylorPlant #LeeJaeyong #ElonMusk #semiconductor
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km@fnnews.com Kim Kyung-min Reporter