Elon Musk says Tesla ‘almost done’ with AI5 design, 6 months after saying it was ‘finished’

Elon Musk took to X today to announce that the design for Tesla’s next-generation self-driving computer, the AI5 chip, is “almost done” – 6 months after he announced that it was “finished.”

The CEO also made a wild claim about accelerating Tesla’s chip development to a 9-month cycle for future generations, starting with AI6.

We have been tracking the development of Tesla’s “AI5” (formerly known as Hardware 5 or HW5) for a while now. It represents the automaker’s next major leap in onboard computing power, following the transition from HW3 to HW4 over the last few years

Musk made the announcement in a recruitment post on X (formerly Twitter) this morning:

Advertisement – scroll for more content

“Our AI5 chip design is almost done and AI6 is in early stages, but there will be AI7, AI8, AI9 … aiming for a 9 month design cycle. ^{Join us to work on what I predict will be the highest volume AI chips in the world by far!”}

This update comes just months after we reported that Tesla had delayed the volume production of the AI5 chip to mid-2027. At the time, Musk confirmed that while samples might be ready sooner, the “several hundred thousand” units needed for vehicle production wouldn’t be available until then.

Today’s news that the “design is almost done” contrasts with his claiming that the design was “finished” back in July 2025.

Usually, once the design is frozen, it takes several months to get “tape-out” and then receive the first samples, followed by a long period of validation and testing before volume production can begin.

It sounds like either Musk lied about Tesla’s chip failing one or more of these steps.

The implication here is significant for Tesla’s upcoming vehicle lineup. If AI5 volume production is indeed set for mid-2027, it all but confirms that the Tesla Cybercab, which is scheduled for 2026, will launch on the current-generation AI4 hardware.

Musk has previously hyped AI5 as being up to 10 times more powerful than the current AI4, which itself was a significant step up from HW3. Tesla is reportedly partnering with Samsung and TSMC to produce these chips, potentially utilizing a 4nm or even 3nm process.

Perhaps the most surprising part of Musk’s statement is the goal for a “9-month design cycle” for AI6, AI7, and beyond. In the semiconductor industry, a 9-month cycle for a major architectural overhaul is unheard of. ^{Even Consumer Electronics giants like Apple operate on annual cycles that are years in the making.}

Electrek’s Take

As always with Elon Musk timelines, I would take this with a massive grain of salt.

Don’t get me wrong, it is exciting to see Tesla pushing the envelope on custom silicon. However, claiming a 9-month design cycle when we are currently seeing multi-year gaps between HW3, HW4, and AI5 feels like classic Musk over-optimism.

Furthermore, this relentless focus on the next hardware leaves a bad taste in the mouths of existing owners. We have extensively covered how Hardware 3 owners are feeling neglected, with FSD updates lagging behind or performing worse than on AI4 vehicles despite having sold them “unsupervised self-driving”. Musk previously claimed HW3 was all that was needed for “full self-driving,” yet here we are talking about AI6, 7, and 8.

If Tesla can’t get its software to run unsupervised on the millions of HW3 and HW4 cars on the road today, does it really matter if AI5 is “almost done”? Nothing currently points to the onboard compute being the bottleneck right now.

In short, this doesn’t seem to be the solution to Tesla’s problem of solving unsupervised self-driving.