Elon Musk Taps Samsung & TSMC For Tesla's Next-Gen AI5 Chip With A Huge Uplift

In the high-stakes, multi-billion-dollar battle for global semiconductor one-upmanship, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has jumped in as a middle person by employing both of the world’s leading chip foundries—Samsung Foundry and TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.) to produce its critical, next-gen AI chip, the AI5.

Elon Musk on Tesla's next-gen HW5 (AI5) chip:

"We are actually going to focus TSMC and Samsung on AI5. The chip design is an amazing design. I have spent almost every weekend the last few months with the chip design on AI5. By some metrics, it will be 40X better than AI4. We… pic.twitter.com/iEV2i9Dk5L

— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 22, 2025

Musk's decision, confirmed during a recent Tesla earnings call, focused on the AI5 chip, which powers Tesla's latest Autopilot hardware and processes real-time self-driving signals. The plan is to have the accelerator manufactured at Samsung's massive ...