Elon Musk says Tesla's next-gen AI5 chip is 40x faster than AI4: calls it a 'beautiful chip'

Elon Musk has said that Tesla's next-generation AI5 processor is an incredible 40x faster -- yes, not 40% but 40 times faster -- than the current AI4 processor.

2

Tesla recently inked a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung Foundry to fab its next-next-gen AI6 processor, with reports suggesting Samsung is making a loss on the deal but considers it a "blessing in disguise", with more on that in the links below.

But during Tesla's recent Q3 2025 earnings call, Musk said that both Samsung and TSMC would be fabbing its AI5 chips, where he added that Samsung's new Taylor, Texas semiconductor fab is "more advanced" when it comes to semiconductor fabrication than TSMC's new Arizona fab.

• Read more: Tesla rumored to make an AI chip for its EVs on the Intel 18A process node
• Read more: Samsung to fab 2nm Tesla AI6 chips at a loss, considers it a 'blessing in disguise'
• Read more: Elon Musk: Samsung's new Texas fab dedicated to Tesla's next-gen AI6 chips
• Read more: Samsung signs $16.5B foundry contract lasting to 2033, for Tesla FSD chips

Elon said: "Okay. So I'm gonna give quite a long answer to this question because I have to unpack this question and then answer the unpacked version. So first of all, I have nothing but great things to say about Samsung. They're an amazing company. And Samsung, it is worth noting, does manufacture our AI4 computer and does a great job at doing that".

"So now with the AI5, and here's what I need to make a point of clarification relative to some comments I've made publicly before, which is we're actually gonna focus both TSMC and Samsung initially on AI5. So the AI5 chip designed by Tesla is I think an amazing design. I've spent almost every weekend for the last few months with the chip design team working on AI5".

"I don't hand out praise easily, but I have to say that I think the Tesla chip team is really designing an incredible chip here. This is by some metrics, the AI5 chip will be 40x faster than the AI4 chip. Not 40%. 40 times. Because we have a detailed understanding of the entire software and hardware stack".

"So we're designing the hardware to address all of the pain points in software, so I don't think there really isn't anyone that's doing this, the entire stack all the way through real world, calibrating against the real world where you've got cars and robots in the real world, that like, we know what the chip needs to do, and we know what just as importantly, what the chip doesn't need to do".

"To sort of give you some examples here, with AI5, we deleted the legacy GPU or the traditional GPU, which is in AI4. So we also deleted the image signal processor (ISP) and this looks like a long list of deletions that are very important. As a result of those deletions, we can actually fit AI5 in a half reticle and with good margin for the traces from the memory to the Tesla trip accelerators, the Arm CPU cores, and the PCI blocks".

"So this is a beautiful chip, I've poured so much life energy into this chip personally, and I'm confident this is gonna be a winner on the next level. So it makes sense to have both Samsung and TSMC focused on AI5, and so technically, the Samsung fab has slightly more advanced equipment than the TSMC fab".

"These (AI4 and AI5 chips) will be made in the US, with TSMC in Arizona, and Samsung in Texas. We're going to be starting off just to be confident of having our explicit goal of having an oversupply of AI5 chips. Because if we have too many AI5 chips for the cars and robots, we can always put them in the data center. So we already use AI4 for training in our data center. So with a combination of AI4 and NVIDIA hardware, we're not about to replace NVIDIA, to be clear, but we do use both in combination -- AI4 and NVIDIA hardware -- and the AI5 excess production, can always put it in our data centers".