Tesla AI5 chip is ready for fabrication, here’s the first look

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, has congratulated the team on taping out AI5 processor, and shared the first look at the next-gen AI chip. AI5 is an ambitious technology, and Musk is weighing big on its future integrations. Therefore, this new announcement can be seen as a critical milestone in its design for fabrication to progress toward 2027 mass production.

The close-up view shows the Tesla logo on the silver substrate, the central dark rectangular silicon die, and the surrounding black areas that are high-bandwidth memory and interconnects. Overall, the AI5 chip looks clean and cutting-edge for AI tasks.

Tesla AI5 chip design (Source – Elon Musk)

Based on previous information, the AI5 chip will bring 10x performance improvement over AI4 (HW4) hardware. It is likely to support 9 times the memory capacity for faster task execution for on-device AI and more parameter processing.

It will have increased 5 times more baseline memory bandwidth and 2,000 to 2,500 TOPS capability. This chip will be used for FSD cars, Optimus robot, training, and data centers. The biggest benefit is performance in task execution powered by higher intelligence in FSD vehicles.

Tesla is currently chasing full autonomy; it has launched robotaxis in Austin, but it needs powerful computing to do the driving close to human intelligence. That’s where AI5 could help it achieve what’s lacking in the current vehicles. On the other hand, the AI4 vehicles are running a supervised version of FSD, which requires human attention.

The next part of Tesla’s major product lineup is the Optimus humanoid robot, which is expected to take over its future business. The first output of the robot will be the industry, and this chip could make it perform more naturally than it currently does.

Since Tesla has shipped the AI5 chip for mass production, the next focus is AI6 and Dojo 3 chipsets. Tesla CEO has confirmed that these two fronts are already open to seek a breakthrough in performance. The company has signed a major deal with Samsung to produce AI6 with a 2nm process in the U.S. More about the AI6 and Dojo3 is yet to come.