As per the latest reports, Samsung Electronics will now help Elon Musk-led Tesla to achieve its goal of developing completely autonomous electric vehicles.
Samsung will produce the Tesla Hardware 5 (HW 5.0) chip, but the South Korean tech giant won’t be the only manufacturer to have access to this market.
According to industry insiders cited by KED Global, fully autonomous EVs will ideally be powered by Tesla’s HW 5.0 chip in three to four years. And the American automaker apparently consented to include Samsung in the initiative.
Samsung will use its 4nm node to produce Tesla’s HW 5.0 chips. Though, the big Korean tech company won’t be operating alone. In 2022, Tesla reportedly agreed to a deal with TSMC to manufacture HW 5.0 chips. But officials say ‘splitting next-generation chip production between the two is more likely.’
Analysing the development, experts said that having two vendors rather than relying on a single chipmaker is logistically advantageous. They also believe that Samsung boss Lee Jae-yong’s encounter with his Tesla counterpart in May 2023 played a role in this latest development.
Tesla previously received processors from Samsung for the electric Model 3, Model 5, X and Y vehicles. Lee Jae-yong’s visit in May would have succeeded, with the goal of enhancing the relationship between the two businesses. Elon Musk was reportedly given a favourable offer for the HW 5.0 contract pricing from Lee Jae-yong ‘that he could not refuse.’
Within the next three to four years, Tesla will likely implement HW 5.0 chips in its EVs to enable Level-5 full automation. The highest level of automation is Level 5, where no human involvement or attention is needed for a vehicle to do all driving responsibilities automatically in any situation.
Meanwhile, Samsung’s R&D team at SAIT (Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology) completed a Level-4 autonomous test that was ‘driver-free’ in May.
Elon Musk also said that Tesla was planning to licence its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver-assist technology to another “major automaker”.
“We’re not trying to keep this to ourselves. We’re more than happy to licence it to others,” Elon Musk reportedly stated.
Tesla has also started production of the Dojo supercomputer to train its fleet of autonomous vehicles.
“We are developing each of these pillars in-house. This month, we are taking a step towards faster and cheaper neural net training with the start of production of our Dojo training computer,” the company remarked.
Dojo training computers will process massive amounts of data, including videos from Tesla cars, for developing self-driving car software.
The electric vehicle maker already has a large Nvidia GPU-based supercomputer, but the new Dojo custom-built computer will be using Tesla-designed chips.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is now prioritizing sales over profits in hopes that Tesla’s elusive full self-driving software would eventually burnish margins, a plan that could deepen an already fierce price war in the electric-vehicle industry, reported Reuters.
“The short-term variances in gross margin and profitability really are minor relative to the long-term picture. Autonomy will make all of these numbers look silly,” the Tesla chief said.