After taking a stake in Intel, the Trump administration seems to have taken upon itself the responsibility of filling Intel's order book, be it the enthusiastic courting of Apple's Tim Cook with anecdotes of the "tens of billions of dollars" that the US government has recorded in gains over the past few months as Intel shares surged, or pressuring Tesla to now abandon TSMC in favor of Intel's Arizona fabs.
Tesla is reportedly facing concerted pressure from the Trump administration to move the fabrication of its AI6.5 chips from TSMC to Intel
Back in April, while discussing the taping out of Tesla's AI5 chip, Elon Musk had announced that the upcoming AI6 chip would be fabricated at Samsung's 2nm fab in Arizona, while the higher-specced AI6.5 chip would be handled by TSMC in its Arizona campus.
For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Tesla's AI6 chip is scheduled for a tape out in December 2026, with AI6.5 following suit a couple of months later.
Both chips reportedly leverage a large allocation of SRAM, with Elon Musk noting last month: "Both chips have ~half of the TRIP AI computation accelerators dedicated to SRAM, so effective memory bandwidth is an order of magnitude greater than DRAM bandwidth for any calculations in SRAM cache."
Also, both AI6 and AI6.5 chips are slated to leverage the new LPDDR6 memory. These two innovations, among others, will reportedly enable the two chips to deliver a 2x performance jump over the AI5 chip, while preserving the same reticle size.
Now, however, the tipster Jukan has picked up on a Weibo-based source that suggests Tesla is thinking about moving the production of its AI6.5 chip from TSMC to Intel "under the pressure and insistence of the Trump administration."
Here is the machine-translated version of the relevant Weibo post:
"Recent news reports that Apple will sign a contract with Intel to outsource some of its processor manufacturing have caused Intel's stock price to surge by 14%.
Besides Apple, Intel will soon have another customer, Tesla. Tesla's current AI5 chip (codenamed Helios) is foundry-manufactured by TSMC and Samsung, and the next-generation AI6 was originally intended to be manufactured by these two companies as well. A friend involved in the Tesla project informed me that, under the pressure and insistence of the Trump administration (which is now Intel's largest shareholder), the AI6 foundry portion manufactured by TSMC will be transferred to Intel. Therefore, Intel will receive the foundry orders for Tesla's AI6. Both Apple and Tesla will be the best publicity for the Trump administration's push for a return to American-made chips during the November midterm elections."
Do note that Tesla has continued to rely on TSMC for the bulk fabrication of its AI5 chips, with Samsung only serving as a backup option, especially given TSMC's choked advanced node capacity.
Against this backdrop, the odds that Tesla will move production away from its main workhorse and towards Intel's still-largely-untested advanced nodes with residual yield issues appear quite long.
Even so, stranger things have happened with the Trump administration now serving as a dedicated champion for Intel. As we noted recently, President Trump appears to have played an important role in selling an Intel-based chip fabrication agreement to Apple's Tim Cook, going so far as to assert in a meeting that he liked Intel and that the government had already made "tens of billions of dollars" from its stake in the chipmaker.
About the author: Writing is my one incontrovertible passion. Over the past six years, he has authored over 2,200 distinct articles on financial and tech-related topics, spanning nearly 1 million words. And he has been a member of Wcctech mobile team since 2025. As an alumnus of the University of Toronto, Rotman Commerce Program, I bring nuance, in-depth knowledge, and a unique perspective to every topic that I cover. When I'm not writing, I'm traveling the world, exploring hidden confectionaries and restaurants as an aspiring food connoisseur.
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