“Samsung’s Fab Is More Advanced Than TSMC’s,” Claims Elon Musk, as Tesla Turns to the Korean Giant for Its Next-Gen AI5 & AI6 Chips
Muhammad Zuhair•Oct 23, 2025 at 07:53am EDT
Elon Musk has said a few words of 'appreciation' for Samsung Foundry, which could go a long way for the Korean giant, as it manages to snag up orders for Tesla's latest AI chips.
Tesla's Upcoming AI5 Chips Are Claimed to Bring In Massive Performance Improvements, Up to 40x the Previous-Generation
One of the most significant achievements for Samsung's foundry division was securing orders for Tesla's AI6 chips, which were to utilize the firm's SF2 (2nm) process. This was seen as a massive breakthrough for the Korean giant, considering that Elon's partnership meant one of the first significant industry exposures to Samsung Foundry. However, at the recent Q3 earnings call, Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, revealed that both Samsung and TSMC are responsible for producing the AI5 chips, and more importantly, Samsung's Taylor fab is "slightly advanced" compared to TSMC's Arizona facility.
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Ray Wang
@rwang07
@elonmusk
gave many interesting details on $TSM and Samsung, as well as $TSLA's AI chips during the earnings call today. Some takeaways (will add more details as I process the transcript). 1. $TSLA will work with both $TSM and Samsung on AI 5 chips (known). 2. In some metrics, AI 5 chips is 40 times better than AI 4....like, wow. Also love some details Elon gave (see #3). 3. Elon said its AI 5 dropped all the legacy components: no traditional GPU, no image signal processor. Those deletions let Tesla fit AI 5 on a half-reticle die with better signal margins between memory, AI accelerators, ARM CPUs, and PCIe blocks 4. In his view, he thinks technically the Samsung fab has slightly more advanced equipment than the $TSM fab. "These (Tesla's AI 5) will both be made in the US, but in one TSMC in Arizona, Samsung in Texas" 5. Another interesting point is "oversupply." Elon believes even in there is oversupply of AI 5 chips, these chips can "always" be use in data centers, and combine them with $NVDA hardware.
We do know that Tesla entered a deal with Samsung to have their AI6 chips produced in the US, but AI5 is a new addition, considering that they were previously produced exclusively at TSMC. This indicates that Samsung Foundry has garnered substantial interest from Elon himself, which is a significant deal for the Korean giant. Interestingly, Elon also discussed the firm's AI5 chips, claiming that they would offer an improvement of up to forty times over AI4. This would be a significant feat, considering that such an upgrade has been achieved by just a single generational change.
Image Credits: Tesla
Discussing the architectural changes within the AI5 chip, Musk notes that Tesla's design team has removed the 'legacy GPU block', likely referring to the general-purpose GPU onboard. Instead, the team has likely integrated AI tile kernels and similar elements for application-specific workloads that would suit Tesla's computing ambitions. Musk also mentions the "half a reticle" size of the AI5 chip, which implies a massive package with many more accelerator tiles and a larger on-chip SRAM footprint, bringing the expected performance improvements that the Tesla team desires.
Elon Musk is so optimistic about AI5 that he actually wants an 'oversupply' of the chips, which means that Samsung's Taylor fab would need to ramp up production volumes to ensure they meet the anticipated demand. Securing Tesla as a client will definitely boost Samsung's efforts to produce in the U.S., ultimately paving the way for a more extensive adoption by customers.
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“Samsung’s Fab Is More Advanced Than TSMC’s,” Claims Elon Musk, as Tesla Turns to the Korean Giant for Its Next-Gen AI5 & AI6 Chips
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Shrink n Stack bonanza JUST started.
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