Tesla Completes Tape-Out of AI5 Chip: The New Brain for Autonomous Driving and Beyond
Tesla has announced the completion of the tape-out for the new AI5 chip. The information came directly from CEO Elon Musk, who confirmed the advancement of subsequent projects, including AI6 and Dojo3, in a post published on X. The tape-out represents a crucial phase in the development of a semiconductor: it indicates that the chip design has been finalized and can be sent to the foundry for physical production. For Tesla, this step marks the entry of the fifth generation of AI accelerators into a more concrete phase, following previous iterations identified as HW2, HW3, and HW4.
Congrats to the @Tesla_AI chip design team on taping out AI5! AI6, Dojo3 & other exciting chips in work.
The new AI5 is positioned as the direct successor to the HW4 architecture, but it also reflects a change in the company's internal nomenclature, which now focuses on a designation more explicitly linked to artificial intelligence. According to the shared image, the chip package integrates twelve DRAM memory modules produced by SK hynix arranged around the compute die. While no official technical details have been released, the configuration suggests the use of high-energy-efficient memory, likely LPDDR5X, a typical solution for edge scenarios where a balance between performance and consumption is required.
According to previous rumors reported by Reuters, AI5 is expected to primarily find applications in Robotaxis and the humanoid robot Optimus. These are areas where low-latency local processing is crucial, and there is a need to reduce dependence on the cloud. Not long ago, Elon Musk announced that Tesla will follow a development cycle of about nine months, leaving the door open for a tape-out of the successor AI6 by the end of 2026. Simultaneously, the Dojo3 project is also progressing, which is part of Tesla's proprietary infrastructure for training artificial intelligence models.
Regarding production, we know that Tesla has signed an exclusive billion-dollar production agreement with Samsung for AI6, while AI5 is being handled by both TSMC and Samsung itself. In the background, however, is Musk's TeraFab project, ready to enter the direct production of semiconductors with the help of Intel.