Under the strong push of the US President Trump's administration, Tesla is considering moving the foundry production of its next-generation AI6.5 artificial intelligence chips from the originally planned TSMC Arizona factory to Intel's advanced process production line in the United States. This move is seen as another key step taken by Washington to help the U.S. chip giant fill its order capacity after acquiring a significant stake in Intel.
According to the report, since the U.S. government took a stake in Intel, Trump has repeatedly used the example of "earning tens of billions of dollars for the government through the rise in Intel's stock price in the past few months" to actively promote the use of Intel's wafer foundry services to many technology companies, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, and vigorously create a "American local chip manufacturing" narrative in Arizona and other places. Today, Tesla is also rumored to be adjusting its high-end AI chip foundry layout in this context.
In April this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said when talking about the progress of AI5 chip tape-out that the next-generation AI6 chip is planned to be taped out at Samsung's 2nm production line in Arizona, while the higher-specification AI6.5 will be manufactured at TSMC's Arizona campus. According to previous plans, the AI6 chip is expected to complete tape-out in December 2026, and AI6.5 will follow in the following months. Most of the AI5 chips (codenamed Helios) currently in mass production are mainly produced by TSMC, with Samsung playing more of a backup role to cope with the tight capacity of TSMC's advanced process.
From an architectural point of view, AI6 and AI6.5 chips are revealed to significantly increase the size of on-chip SRAM and use new LPDDR6 memory. Musk previously mentioned that approximately half of the TRIP AI computing acceleration units of the two chips are used to serve SRAM, which makes the effective bandwidth in the SRAM cache one order of magnitude higher than that of traditional DRAM, thereby increasing the expected performance improvement of the entire generation to about twice that of AI5 without changing the mask size.
The rumor of transferring orders to Intel came from a Weibo message relayed by whistleblower Jukan. The content stated that after Apple reportedly handed over part of its processor manufacturing contract to Intel, driving the latter's stock price to rise by about 14% in a single day, Tesla will also transfer part of its AI6 series chip production capacity originally manufactured by TSMC to Intel under the "pressure and insistence" of the Trump administration. The source said that an industry insider involved in the Tesla project revealed that the Trump administration, as one of Intel's largest shareholders, hopes that by pushing Apple and Tesla to adopt Intel foundry, it can provide the best endorsement for its political proposition of "revitalizing American chip manufacturing" before the U.S. midterm elections in November this year.
It should be pointed out that if Tesla really shifts its high-end AI chip orders on a large scale from the mature TSMC to Intel, which is still in the ramp-up period and has uncertainty in the yield rate of advanced processes, it will be a high-risk decision for this electric vehicle and AI company. It is currently generally believed in the industry that TSMC is still the "main factory" for computing-intensive customers such as Tesla in terms of high-performance, low-power consumption cutting-edge processes. In this context, it remains to be seen whether Tesla will take a risk on Intel in order to cooperate with Washington’s industrial policies. However, at a time when Trump is positioning himself as Intel’s “number one salesman”, it is not impossible for the industry chain to undergo an “unexpected” reorganization.
The report also recalled that when Trump recently discussed with Apple’s top executives the use of Intel wafer foundry, he repeatedly emphasized that he “likes Intel very much” and used the government’s book gains on Intel’s shareholding as an example to show business executives the “double political and economic dividends” of this cooperation. Prior to this, it was revealed that Apple had signed a new chip foundry agreement with Intel, which was regarded as an important hedge against TSMC's supply chain risks. Now, with the news of potential orders from Tesla, whether domestic chip manufacturing in the United States can truly challenge the dominance of East Asian wafer giants has once again become the focus of attention in the global semiconductor industry.