Elon Musk pitches Tesla’s in-house AI chip ambitions, seeks talent for next-generation designs

Elon Musk has said Tesla has been building advanced AI chips for several years, revealing details about the electric carmaker’s in-house silicon roadmap as it looks to scale its autonomous driving and humanoid robotics efforts. In a post on X, Musk said Tesla’s internal chip and board engineering team has already designed and deployed “several million AI chips” across its vehicles and data centres, hardware that he claimed underpins the company’s efforts around real-world AI training.

According to Musk, the current generation of chips used in Tesla cars is AI4, while AI5 is close to tape-out and early work has begun on AI6. Tesla’s ambition, he said, is to bring a new AI chip design to volume production every 12 months, adding that the company expects to ultimately manufacture chips “at higher volumes than all other AI chips combined.”

“These chips will profoundly change the world in positive ways, saving millions of lives due to safer driving and providing advanced medical care to all people via Optimus,” Musk wrote.



Tesla has also opened a direct hiring channel for AI silicon engineers, asking candidates to send evidence of their “exceptional ability” to a dedicated email address. Musk said the company is particularly keen on talent that can apply cutting-edge AI techniques to chip design, an area increasingly seen as a competitive frontier among global tech firms.

The announcement comes as automakers and Big Tech companies step up efforts to build custom silicon to power autonomous driving and robotics, competing with GPU-heavy architectures dominated by Nvidia.