Musk Clarifies: Samsung Will Collaborate With TSMC to Manufacture Tesla AI5 Chip

ITHomeOn October 23, it was reported that Tesla CEO Elon Musk stated that Samsung Electronics is increasingly involved in manufacturing chips for the automaker, indicating that the South Korean company is gradually entering a market originally dominated by TSMC.

In Tesla's third-quarter investor conference call, Musk revealed that Samsung will share the manufacturing responsibilities of Tesla's current generation AI chip, AI5, with TSMC. Previously, he had stated that the chip would be exclusively produced by TSMC, the world's largest custom semiconductor foundry.

“I need to clarify some content from my previous public statements: In fact, we initially relied on both TSMC and Samsung to produce the AI5 chip.," Musk said.

Tesla relies on these artificial intelligence chips to power its autonomous driving features and the early-stage humanoid robot product line. The company combines its self-developed chips with leading AI computing processors produced by NVIDIA.

Musk also stated that Tesla is working to achieve "overproduction" of chips, and any chips not used for cars or robots can be utilized in the company's data centers. "Our clear goal is to have an oversupply of AI5 chips," Musk said.

Previously, Tesla used Nvidia's Drive chips in its vehicles, but in 2019, it switched to using its own self-developed processors. Musk pointed out that despite this, Tesla will continue to use Nvidia's dominant graphics processing units (GPUs) to train its artificial intelligence models. "To be clear,We are not looking to replace Nvidia, but we will indeed use chips from both companies simultaneously."Elon Musk stated. He also mentioned that Tesla currently has computing power equivalent to that of 81,000 NVIDIA H100 chips."

In July of this year, Musk stated that Tesla would entrust Samsung to produce the next-generation AI6 chip. The two parties signed an agreement worth $16.5 billion (IT Home note: the current exchange rate is approximately 117.074 billion yuan), which is seen as a significant victory for Samsung's foundry business, which specializes in manufacturing chips on behalf of clients.

At that time, Musk stated that Samsung was already producing the previous generation AI4 chip, while the currently in-development version of the chip would still rely on TSMC for manufacturing.

Despite currently lagging far behind TSMC in the semiconductor foundry industry and ranking second, Samsung is increasing its investment in a production center near Austin, where Tesla's headquarters is located.