Elon Musk has offered a glimpse into Tesla’s next wave of artificial intelligence hardware, revealing that the company is already working on four upcoming chip generations — AI5 through AI8.
The announcement came in a post on X, where Musk said he had “just finished a long AI5 design review with the Tesla California and Texas chip engineers,” describing it as “going to be great.”
He added that AI6 and AI7 will follow “in fast succession,” while AI8 will be “out of this world.” Though Musk didn’t go into technical detail, his comments signal a major acceleration in Tesla’s in-house silicon development — a critical piece of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) and robotics ambitions.
From AI3 to AI4
Tesla’s journey in chip development hasn’t been smooth. The company’s Hardware 3 (HW3) platform — also referred to more recently as AI3 — faced a range of limitations that have motivated its rapid progression toward newer generations. Introduced in 2019, HW3 powered the FSD computer found in most Tesla vehicles built since then, enabling neural-network-based perception and decision-making on-board.
However, as the complexity of Tesla’s self-driving neural networks grew, HW3 began to show its age, and its limitations. The chip struggled to process the vast amounts of data required for autonomous driving, especially as FSD evolved into its 12.x software series that relies on advanced end-to-end video processing, with Tesla eventually acknowledging that HW3’s compute power simply isn’t sufficient for the latest AI models running natively.
This bottleneck has forced Tesla to limit FSD capabilities on HW3-equipped vehicles, reserving the current and more advanced versions for AI4.
Tesla has also said it will offer computer upgrades to owners of AI3 vehicles, however the timeline for these retrofits is uncertain as the company recently announced they won’t begin until full autonomy is solved.
AI5 and Beyond
According to Musk, AI5 is being produced by TSMC, the same semiconductor giant that manufactures chips for Apple and NVIDIA. It’s expected to deliver a significant leap in performance and efficiency, supporting more advanced real-time inference for autonomous driving and robotics applications.
Tesla’s AI6, likely to built by Samsung in the U.S., and AI7, which Musk said will arrive shortly after, will continue this rapid iteration cycle. While Musk said these chips would follow in quick succession, no specific timelines were provided.
“AI8 Will Be Out of This World”
The final part of Musk’s post — that “AI8 will be out of this world” — hints at even broader ambitions. Whether metaphorical or literal, the phrase may allude to a future integration of Tesla’s AI systems with SpaceX or xAI, potentially enabling off-Earth capabilities, a possibly Musk seemed to hint at by replying to a post suggesting AI8 will be for orbital data centers.
