Elon Musk says Tesla is working on custom AI chips

Designing specialized processing chips for artificial intelligence is becoming common for serious tech companies, and Tesla, it seems, is no exception. According to reports from both The Register and CNBC, CEO Elon Musk was talking up the company’s custom AI chips at machine learning conference NIPS last night, telling attendees that Tesla is “developing specialized AI hardware that we think will be the best in the world.”

“I wanted to make it clear that Tesla is serious about AI, both on the software and hardware fronts,” said Musk, according to The Register. “We are developing custom AI hardware chips".

We’d heard rumors about Tesla building its own AI chips before, with a CNBC report in September claiming that the company had more than 50 people working on the project. These include respected industry veteran Jim Keller, who previously worked at AMD and Apple, and who joined Tesla in January 2016 as vice president of Autopilot Hardware Engineering. Keller’s hiring was as good an indication as any of Tesla’s intent, but we’ve reached out to the company to try and confirm Musk’s comments, and will update this story if and when we hear back.

Specialized chips could help give Tesla an edge in the self-driving race. Currently, the company uses Nvidia’s graphics cards to power its self-driving functionality, but custom hardware could improve performance — allowing for faster calculations and therefore, theoretically, greater safety on the road.