Tesla is all set to begin production of its AI5 chip on Samsung's 2nm process technology after a successful tapeout back in April.
Samsung & TSMC To Produce Tesla's AI5 Chip With The Former Leveraging Its 2nm Capabilities
Last month, Elon Musk announced the successful tape-out of its AI5 AI chip. Elon shared pictures of the chip, featuring a large primary die in the middle that will handle all of the compute and 12 DRAM modules on the outskirts, offering high capacity and efficiency-optimized bandwidth. The DRAM modules in the picture are from SK hynix, and while the DRAM SKU ID is not readable, we can see the chip was taped out in the 13th week of 2026, which is between 23rd March and 29th March.
As per the latest reports from Yonhap News and The Guru, the AI5 chip will largely be built on Samsung's 2nm process technology at its Taylor Fab in Texas, US. It is yet to be confirmed what process technology the chip will use at TSMC fabs, but the leveraging of Samsung's 2nm node gives the Korean semiconductor giant a big boost to its chipmaking endeavors, and brings a lot of confidence in the highly debated status of its 2nm manufacturing capabilities.
According to industry sources on the 13th, Kim Jeong-gon, a senior engineer at Samsung Foundry, posted on his LinkedIn on the 11th (local time) that "the Tesla-Samsung AI5 chip has entered the tape-out stage (the stage where the design is completed and the blueprints are handed over to the foundry plant)." He added, "This chip is scheduled to be produced at the Taylor plant using a 2nm process and will soon be installed in Tesla's latest products."
AI5 is the follow-up to HW4 and will arrive as a next-gen FSD solution for Tesla. In a previous talk, Elon Musk stated that AI5 will offer a monumental 40x improvement over the HW4 chip, with 8x raw compute capabilities, 9x memory, and will deliver brand-new features. The chip itself is expected to offer close to 2500 TOPS of AI compute, 144 GB of memory per chip, and is designed with the latest transformer engine in mind.
But there's more, Elon Musk has also stated previously that solving AI5 was an existential task for Tesla & it will be a very capable AI chip and AI platform. AI5 will be offered in multiple configurations, one being a single-SOC that rivals NVIDIA's Hopper, and then a dual-SOC design that rivals Blackwell while costing much less to produce and using way less power. So we can expect some competitive Perf/$ & Perf/W versus NVIDIA's latest AI offerings.
The chip is expected to be manufactured at TSMC and Samsung, with high-volume production slated for late 2026 or early 2027. Elon has shared plans to move next-gen chip production to the upcoming TeraFab, but its announcement is still pending.
Meanwhile, Elon also confirms that work is already underway on the next-generation Tesla AI6 chip and Dojo3. Since Tesla announced a return to form in the chipmaking business, the plans for Dojo3 are back on track. Tesla resumed the plans for the Supercomputer project back in January 2026, and with Terafab operational and developing DRAM, Packaging, and Chips, all under one roof, this goal should not be far away now.
News Source: Trendforce
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.
