en.Wedoany.com Reported - Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on social platform X on April 15, 2026, that Tesla's AI chip design team has successfully completed the tape-out of the AI5 chip. In his post, Musk congratulated the team on reaching this critical milestone and thanked TSMC and Samsung Electronics for their support in the production phase. He also revealed that AI6, Dojo3, and other "exciting chips" are currently under development. Musk stated that AI5 is poised to become one of the highest-volume AI chips ever produced.
The completion of the tape-out signifies that AI5 has officially transitioned from the design phase to the manufacturing verification stage. AI5 is the successor to Tesla's HW4 chip and will serve as the core hardware for the next-generation Full Self-Driving (FSD) solution. Compared to HW4, AI5 achieves a 40-fold leap in comprehensive performance, with raw computing power increasing 8 times and memory capacity increasing 9 times. A single AI5 chip offers near 2500 TOPS of AI compute power and 144GB of memory, optimized for Transformer engines. AI5 is available in single-SOC and dual-SOC configurations. The single-SOC version's performance rivals NVIDIA's Hopper architecture chips, while the dual-SOC version's performance rivals NVIDIA's Blackwell architecture chips. In terms of manufacturing cost and power consumption, AI5 holds advantages over NVIDIA's high-end AI chips, demonstrating direct competitiveness in performance per dollar and performance per watt. Musk previously stated that the successful development and deployment of AI5 is a core task vital to Tesla's survival.
Photographs of the physical chip show a large compute core die in the center of the AI5, surrounded by 12 LPDDR5X memory modules supplied by SK Hynix. Based on a capacity of 16GB per module, a single AI5 SoC features a total LPDDR5X capacity of 192GB. Chip identification information indicates the tape-out occurred in week 13 of 2026, between March 23rd and 29th. The "KR2613" marking suggests the prototype was manufactured at Samsung's factory in South Korea.
AI5 employs a dual-foundry strategy, with manufacturing responsibilities shared between TSMC and Samsung. Mass production will be distributed across Samsung's factory in Taylor, Texas, USA; TSMC's factory in Arizona, USA; and TSMC's factories in Taiwan, China. Large-scale mass production is scheduled to commence from late 2026 to early 2027, with full production capacity expected in the second half of 2027. Musk also revealed that future AI5 production will be transferred to Tesla's self-built TeraFab chip factory, which has not yet been officially announced.
Tesla's chip development cycle has been shortened to nine months. The AI6 chip is expected to complete tape-out in December 2026 and achieve mass production in 2027. Its single-chip compute power is anticipated to double that of AI5, primarily targeting the edge computing needs of the Optimus humanoid robot and Robotaxi autonomous taxis. Samsung Electronics and Tesla signed a $16.5 billion production agreement in July 2025. Samsung will be the exclusive contract manufacturer for the AI6 chip, with the agreement valid until 2033. The chip will utilize a 2-nanometer process for higher performance and lower power consumption. Tesla restarted its Dojo supercomputer project in January 2026, with the Dojo3 supercomputer chip also under simultaneous development. Once the TeraFab factory becomes operational, Tesla will achieve an integrated, end-to-end layout encompassing DRAM development, chip packaging, and chip manufacturing.
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