Elon Musk Claims Tesla's New Samsung AI Chip Will Be 40x Faster Than Current Models

Tesla's advanced driver assistance system was first launched in beta in 2020, and since then, it's become part and parcel of the experience and one of the reasons people buy the automaker's cars. Since it first landed in the hands of users, the company has been regularly updating its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) (FSD) system by fixing bugs, adding new features, and improving reliability and performance. FSD has become so good now that a Tesla drove across the U.S. without human intervention, which you wouldn't think was possible a few years ago. 

Moving forward, you should expect even better performance from Tesla's FSD, as the company's CEO, Elon Musk, is promising a massive upgrade coming to future Tesla models. The performance improvements will be driven by a new custom inference chip, the AI5, which was first announced in 2024. In a Q3 2025 earnings call with investors held in October 2025, Musk claimed that the new chip will be more performant than the AI4, which powers FSD in current Tesla EVs. Musk claims that the AI5 chip will be 40 times better than the AI4 chip in some metrics. 

Although Musk hasn't specified in which metrics the AI5 is 40 times faster than the AI4, it appears that Tesla's boss is quite confident about the general performance of the new chip, with plans to produce them in excess and use the remaining ones in the company's data centers. The AI4 has been around for three years as of this writing, and it powers Tesla's so-called FSD Hardware 4.0, which started shipping in the company's EVs in January 2023.

It remains unclear when Tesla will start sticking the AI5 in its cars, so don't hold your breath. In an X post, Musk shared an image of an already-fabricated processor and said that the company has finished designing the AI5. Deployment timelines aside, the more important question, if you're a Tesla fan or someone considering an EV from the automaker in the future, is the repercussions of the performance gains that Musk claims the AI5 brings. The crucial benefit is to enable Tesla engineers to create larger and more complex AI models to power FSD without hitting the hardware performance ceiling that they might be currently facing with the AI4. 

While Tesla's boss has tried to downplay the benefits that AI5 will bring, saying that "AI4 is enough to achieve much better than human safety for FSD," the next-gen chip should allow the company's autonomous driving system to leverage bigger parameter models with better performance. The company has recently released version 14.3 of FSD, promising 20% faster reaction times and smoother driving, among other improvements based on a model with just about a billion parameters. 

The automaker is also working on a 10-billion-parameter version of FSD that will be introduced as part of v15. Now you can imagine the improvements that the company can add to FSD once there's a more capable chip like the AI5 under the hood. You should expect better FSD performance powered by even bigger models, because as it stands, Tesla's autonomous driving system is far from perfect, and that's why it still requires driver supervision.