Tesla Tapes Out AI5 Chip With Fivefold Performance Gain, Targets 2027 Mass Production

Tesla’s in-house AI chips are central to its efforts to reduce reliance on outside suppliers and advance Full Self-Driving, or FSD, and its Optimus humanoid robot. The current AI4 handles onboard image processing and decision inference. A major computing boost from the next-generation AI5 would directly affect the deployment of autonomous-driving training results and the pace of robot commercialization.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the AI5 had completed tapeout and would deliver about five times the computing performance of the AI4, with inference performance from a single chip comparable to an Nvidia H100. TSMC and Samsung will jointly manufacture the chip, with mass production targeted for mid-2027. Tesla has also begun developing the AI6 and revived its Dojo3 supercomputer project.