Eight-year deal was confirmed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on X.
Samsung Electronics has secured an eight-year, $16.5 billion deal with Tesla to manufacture the electric car maker’s forthcoming AI6 chip and its fab in Taylor, Texas.
The news was confirmed by Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, on his social media platform X, where he wrote: “Samsung’s giant new Texas fab will be dedicated to making Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip. The strategic importance of this is hard to overstate.”
In another post, Musk said: “The $16.5bn number is just the bare minimum. Actual output is likely to be several times higher.”
Samsung is also the manufacturer of Tesla’s AI4 chip, although production of the AI5 will be undertaken by TSMC at its fab in Arizona, Musk said.
Unlike Tesla’s Dojo D1 chips, which support data center-level training for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistant technology, the AI4 chips, which were previously known as HW4 (Hardware 4), provide in-car inference to power the FSD systems.
The FT reported that the AI6 will power the company’s autonomous driving and humanoid robot technologies, noting that Musk also stated on Tesla’s Q2 earnings call last week that he hoped the chips could also be deployed in data centers to support the automotive company’s video-based AI model training programs.
Commenting on the decision to work with Samsung again for production of the AI6, Musk wrote: “Samsung agreed to allow Tesla to assist in maximizing manufacturing efficiency. This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress. And the fab is conveniently located not far from my house.”
The announcement comes several weeks after it was reported that Samsung was delaying the completion of its Texas chip fab following a struggle to find customers, the second delay the site has suffered after Samsung halted work in 2024 in order to upgrade the foundry process at the facility from 4nm to 2nm and allow the chipmaker to better compete with TSMC.
The facility, one of two Samsung is building in Texas as part of a $40bn investment in the state, is slated to go online in 2026.
In June 2025, a number of job listings for California-based senior sales positions were posted by the company, with the new recruits presumably set to work under Margaret Han, a former TSMC and Intel executive who was appointed to lead Samsung’s North American chip foundry operations in March of this year.
