EVwire brief: Samsung Foundry has confirmed that its version of Tesla's AI5 chip has reached tape-out, the milestone that freezes a design and clears it to enter fabrication. In plain terms, Samsung can now start physically building its AI5, and it is bound for volume production at Samsung's Taylor, Texas fab on the company's latest 2nm process.
EVwire was the first to the scene, finding this and breaking the news to the world.
The word comes from James Kim, a Principal Engineer with 18 years at Samsung Foundry, in a post on LinkedIn.
It is a different tape-out from the one Elon Musk celebrated back in April, which marked Tesla finishing the AI5 design and shipping it to the foundries.
Because Tesla dual-sources AI5 from both Samsung and TSMC, each foundry runs its own tape-out on its own process, and Samsung's is the foundry-side green light.
A quick word on the vocabulary, because it is doing a lot of work here.
A "tape-out" is the point where a chip design is finalized and handed off for manufacturing.
When Musk posted in April, he was announcing Tesla's design tape-out: the AI5 blueprint was done. What Samsung is now confirming is its own tape-out, meaning Samsung has finished turning that blueprint into a manufacturable layout for its node and can move it onto the line.
The reason there are two of them at all is that AI5 is not one single physical chip. Musk said as much when he first laid out the dual-foundry plan:
Slightly different versions of the Tesla AI5 chip will be made at TSMC and Samsung simply because they translate designs to physical form differently, but the goal is that our AI software works identically.
Samsung's runs on SF2T, a customized 2nm-class node it originally developed with the follow-on AI6 in mind and then pulled forward for AI5.
The earliest Samsung-made prototypes carried a "KR2613" marking, pointing to prototype runs in the 13th week of 2026 at a Korean fab, but Kim's post puts volume manufacturing at the Taylor, Texas plant on Samsung's latest 2nm process, paired with SK hynix and Samsung LPDDR5X memory.
Context: Dual-sourcing AI5 is Tesla hedging its single most important supply line. Samsung and TSMC are the two largest pure-play foundries on the planet, and splitting the chip between them means no single fab outage, yield stumble, or geopolitical wrinkle can strand Tesla's autonomy roadmap.
The arrangement sits inside the $16.5 billion deal Tesla signed with Samsung in July 2025, which also hands Samsung the next chip, AI6, to build on its 2nm line at the new Taylor, Texas fab.
That 2nm detail is worth pausing on. For months the exact AI5 node was fuzzy, with some coverage pegging Samsung's version at 3nm and others at the 2nm-class SF2T. Kim's post comes down firmly on the 2nm side, and it places AI5 at Taylor, the same fab and node family already lined up for the next chip, AI6. If it holds, Tesla's first Samsung-built AI5 volume would be a made-in-America, 2nm part.
On timing, temper the excitement.
A tape-out is the start of manufacturing, not the finish of it. Engineering samples of AI5 are expected late in 2026, with volume production not realistically arriving until the middle-to-back half of 2027. That is roughly two years later than Musk's original pitch that AI5 would be in cars by late 2025 (* checks notes * it is now mid-2026).
Tesla has said it wants several hundred thousand finished AI5 boards stockpiled before it flips its production lines over, so meaningful in-vehicle deployment likely waits until 2028. The AI5 and AI6 chips are the silicon Tesla is betting its robotaxi and Optimus ambitions on, so the schedule is not a footnote.
Design tape-outs get the Elon post and the fanfare; foundry tape-outs get the chip built. This is the quieter of the two milestones, and to me the more concrete one, because it is the foundry, not the designer, saying the thing is ready to run.
Source: EVwire on X; Elon Musk on X;
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