Elon Musk calls out engineers as Tesla races to create new AI chips every year, aiming to beat all rivals
Elon Musk is turning Tesla into a full-fledged AI chip powerhouse. He is now calling on top engineers to help him develop and mass-produce an advanced AI chip every year.
Elon Musk is looking for top-tier engineers to join Tesla’s AI chip division, as the company aggressively pushes to produce a brand new AI chip every 12 months. In his latest post on X, the Tesla boss outlined the company’s ambitious roadmap for next-generation chipsets to power its cars, data centers, robots and beyond. With an emphasis on in-house chips, Musk is also pushing Tesla into direct competition with established AI-chip makers and the emerging in-house efforts of Google, OpenAI and Meta.
According to Musk, Tesla has been quietly building its own AI chips for years, deploying “several million” on its vehicles and data centers. These chips run Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) stack and support workloads for the Optimus humanoid robot, which Musk often refers to as “real-world AI.” As demand for more sophisticated onboard intelligence grows, Tesla now wants to dramatically shorten its development cycle, shifting from multi-year chip iterations to an annual, almost smartphone-style cadence.
“The current version in cars is AI4, we are close to finishing AI5 and starting work on AI6,” Musk wrote, adding that the goal is to “bring a new AI chip design to mass production every 12 months.” He went even further, claiming that Tesla eventually intends to produce the chips “in greater quantities than all other AI chips combined.”
As part of his public call for talent, Musk is urging engineers with exceptional ability in AI chip design, physical layout, board engineering and signal integrity to email Tesla directly, complete with “three bullet points” proving their expertise. Musk also noted that he himself is deeply involved in Tesla’s path forward. “FWIW, I’m deeply involved in chip design and meet with the engineering team every Tuesday and Saturday.” He said Saturday’s meetings would stop once AI5 was completely taped out. Notably, this is hardly unusual for Musk, as he has a well-documented history of personally overseeing critical hardware development steps at Tesla and SpaceX.
One thing Musk has also made clear is that with Tesla’s next generation chips the company is not only focusing on safe autonomous driving, but according to Musk the new generation chips will “change the world in positive ways”, enable advanced medical care through Optimus and unlock new AI-powered systems beyond the automotive sector. By tying semiconductor development directly to long-term robotics ambitions, Musk places these chips at the center of Tesla’s broader real-world-AI vision.
big payout
As for the new talent needed to fulfill this dream, Tesla’s career page is already showing several Palo Alto-based roles in the AI hardware team, which includes vehicle compute systems, Dojo training hardware, and robotics platforms. And while Musk is personally calling engineers, he is also willing to pay for the best.
Tesla’s listing suggests the new AI-chip roles will come with serious pay checks. Physical design engineers with 10+ years of chip-design experience can expect to make between $152,000 and $264,000 per year, plus cash bonuses, stock awards, and full benefits. Meanwhile, signal and power-integrity engineering roles responsible for validating Tesla’s next-generation chips for vehicles and the Optimus robot pay between $120,000 and $318,000 annually, with stock and cash compensation.
