launcht - Tesla is making AI chips for its autonomous vehicles.
- CEO Elon Musk broke the news on Thursday at a company party following an intelligence conference.
- Jim Keller, the company’s vice president of hardware, indicated that producing the chips in-house could allow Tesla to make them much more powerful at a fraction of their current cost.
Elon Musk has revealed that Tesla, his electric automobile company, is developing its own custom chips for its driverless cars. Musk confirmed the company has a team hard at work, developing its own AI chips on which future Teslas will depend upon in place of the Nvidia units currently used in the automaker’s all-electric vehicles. Musk dropped the news at a private company party in Long Beach.
I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts. We are developing custom AI hardware chips
– Elon Musk, Tesla CEO
The team is being headed by Jim Keller, a former AMD and Apple chip architect who helped to design the iPhone maker’s A4 and A5 processors. The new processor is projected to cut down costs and reliance on outside suppliers like Nvidia while creating greater efficiency and computing power by developing the hardware and software components in tandem, as with competitor Waymo’s specialized Intel chips.
