Elon Musk reveals the next generation of smart driving chips

Elon Musk revealed new details about Tesla's next-generation autonomous driving computer, which many expect to be called Hardware 5 (HW5).

However, Musk stated that it will not be called HW5, but rather AI5. Musk also revealed that this technology will be applied to vehicles in the second half of 2025.

After about fifteen months of the current autonomous driving computer HW4 being put into use, the automaker is seeking more improvements in addressing its full self-driving suite.

This will be the most powerful hardware version to date, as the energy consumption of AI5 is about four times that of HW3 and HW4. This requires even more powerful efforts than before.

It all started with the giant fan at the Texas Gigafactory, with Musk confirming that "the factory will use about 130MW of power and cooling equipment this year, but will increase to over 500MW in the next 18 months or so."

He also mentioned that he hopes to use 50% of Tesla's AI hardware, with the other half provided by NVIDIA and other manufacturers. Musk stated that Tesla's hardware is "primarily HW4, with some Dojo."

However, Musk plans to introduce AI5 at some point in the second half of 2025. This raises the question: what will it be used for?

With the Robotaxi event scheduled for August 8th, we can speculate that Tesla will announce a fairly aggressive actual product launch schedule. Given that the Robotaxi event will take place in the second half of this year, the new AI5 may be specifically used for the Robotaxi fleet.

Musk even mentioned that the capabilities of AI5 are approximately ten times that of HW4:

Tesla's Ambitions

By the end of this year, Tesla will add an additional 50,000 Nvidia H100 AI chips to the existing 35,000 chips in its car autonomous driving data center.

The company's goal is to quickly improve FSD, submit its safety record to regulators, and obtain approval for its independent Robotaxi and upcoming CyberCab ride-hailing service.

If Robotaxi and a more affordable car are what Tesla refers to as "economical models," then according to Elon Musk, they will be launched in the fourth quarter of 2024 or the first quarter of 2025, both equipped with the Hardware 4.0 FSD suite.

There are rumors that the Model 2, originally planned to be launched in the second half of 2025, may be equipped with a 3nm chip Hardware 5.0. Elon now states that the HW5 suite is essentially ready, but Tesla will start shipping vehicles equipped with this suite at the end of 2025 Regardless, in addition to equipping the center with Nvidia H100, Tesla is also preparing to utilize the downtime of its autonomous driving computer (such as the computer in the FSD HW4 or HW5 kit) to run AI inference calculations:

Integrating 100 megawatts of AI computing power is very challenging. Even in the future of autonomous driving, where a car's usage time may not be 10 hours per week but 50 hours per week, there is still over 100 hours per week for the car's inference computer to do other things.

Tesla is clearly fully committed to the field of autonomous driving and is exploring ways to make this strategic profitable. In addition to the "dedicated" Robotaxi to be announced on August 8th, Elon Musk also stated that the company will launch the CyberCab ride-hailing service.

Robotaxis may say that Tesla will have a fleet of autonomous driving cars owned and operated by them. However, any Tesla owner can choose whether to rent their car as part of the CyberCab fleet. Elon likened it to a mobile Airbnb operated like Uber, and Tesla even showcased the user interface of the CyberCab ride-hailing app.

It is also in talks with a large automaker for FSD licensing, which will not only provide software but also HW4 or HW5 computer and camera kits. This will bring a lot of road computing power, which can improve FSD by running inference calculations through feedback loops during vehicle downtime.

Some predict that the emissions of autonomous driving car computers may eventually rival those of all data centers in the world.

However, before achieving this goal, Tesla must face regulatory agencies and convince them that FSD is safer than human driving. This partly explains Tesla's investment in AI computing power and lowering the price threshold for millions of Tesla users to record FSD mileage.

Reference link

https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-tesla-hw5-release-date-ai5/