Tesla Inc‘s (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk just offered a rare glimpse into how he actually allocates his most valuable currency: time. And no, it's not campaign rallies, social media, or culture-war sparring. His Saturdays, he said, are booked solid with silicon.
"If I'm spending my Saturdays on something, it's going to be something pretty important," Musk told investors on Tesla's fourth quarter earnings call. That something is the company's next-generation AI5 chip—now, in his words, arguably Tesla's single most critical project.
The subtext is clear: Tesla's future hinges less on cars and more on compute.
The AI Chip Bottleneck Thesis
Musk laid out a stark constraint for Tesla's growth over the next three to four years: chips. No, it wasn’t demand, not manufacturing, not even batteries. Compute.
He argued that AI logic and memory could become the limiting factor for vehicle production, Optimus robots, and data-center training workloads. In other words, Tesla's growth ceiling may be set by silicon supply, not consumer demand.
That framing matters. It suggests Tesla increasingly views itself as a vertically integrated AI hardware company—cars and robots as endpoints for compute.
Tesla's Terafab Ambition
Musk then floated what could be one of Tesla's most radical pivots yet: building its own massive semiconductor fabrication complex—a "Tesla terafab" integrating logic, memory, and packaging.
He acknowledged fabs are brutally hard but leaned into Tesla's core mythology: "We do hard things." The strategic logic is twofold—removing supplier constraints and insulating Tesla from geopolitical risks that could disrupt global chip supply chains.
He even joked that while Micron Technology Inc (NASDAQ:MU) makes chips in Idaho, the state mostly makes potato chips. The subtext wasn't funny: the U.S. lacks advanced memory fabs at scale, and that's a strategic vulnerability.
The Bigger Signal
Musk's Saturdays on AI5 aren't a quirky anecdote. They're a signal that Tesla's center of gravity is shifting—from automaker to AI infrastructure player, with silicon as the ultimate choke point.
If Musk is right, the next Tesla megaproject won't be a new car, battery, or robot. It'll be a chip factory—because in the AI era, factories don't just build products. They build intelligence.
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