It's no secret that Elon Musk has tremendous ambitions when it comes to artificial intelligence, but apparently, they are so tremendous that he wants to get more AI processors than the industry produces, or even can produce. As it turns out, Tesla might need '100 – 200 billion AI chips per year' and if it cannot get them from existing foundry partners, then the company will consider building its own fabs, which Musk discussed several weeks ago. Now he has elaborated on those goals further.
"I have tremendous respect for TSMC and Samsung, we work with both TSMC and Samsung at Tesla and SpaceX. They are great companies and we want them to make our chip as quickly as they can and scale up to the highest possible volume that they are comfortable doing," said Elon Musk, during his conversation with Ron Baron. "But it doesn't appear to be fast enough. When I asked how long it would take from start to finish to build a new chip fab built, they said five years to get to production. Five years for me is eternity. My timelines are one year, two years. […] I cannot even see past three years. This is not going to be fast enough. If they change their minds and say, yeah, they are going to go faster and they want to provide us with 100 billion, 200 billion AI chips a year in the time frame that we need them, that is great."
