Image: Tesla
Tesla’s AI ambitions are quickly expanding beyond Earth. Following SpaceX’s jaw-dropping proposal to deploy up to one million AI-powered satellites as orbital data centers, Elon Musk has now outlined how Tesla’s next-generation AI chips are being designed to support that vision — starting with space-ready hardware and scaling toward truly massive levels of compute.
Responding to questions about how SpaceX’s orbital AI infrastructure would handle training workloads, Musk said that “most of training is inference for the purpose of training, so these work for a majority of training workload too,” reinforcing the idea that space-based AI compute isn’t just theoretical, but practical with the right silicon.
Musk then laid out a clearer roadmap for Tesla’s in-house AI chips. According to him, AI5 and AI6 will be suitable for space-based use at lower energy scales, while later generations will be designed to unlock dramatically larger compute capacity. “AI5/AI6 will be fine for space at the low GW/year scale,” he said, adding that AI7/Dojo3 will target a capacity of more than 10GW/year while AI8/Dojo4 will be built for deployments exceeding 100GW/year.
This roadmap builds on Tesla’s recent decision to reboot its previously shelved Dojo supercomputer project, as the company accelerates its transition from an automaker into what Musk increasingly describes as a physical AI company. AI5 — also known as Hardware 5 — is expected to deliver up to a 50x performance leap over today’s AI4 hardware, powering Full Self-Driving, Optimus, and next-generation data center workloads. Musk has said AI5 is nearly complete, with AI6 already in development under Tesla’s planned nine-month iteration cycle.
Crucially, Musk previously confirmed that while AI5 and AI6 will dramatically improve autonomy on Earth, AI7 and beyond are being designed from the ground up with space-based AI compute in mind. That aligns closely with SpaceX’s plan to deploy solar-powered orbital data centers capable of operating at energy scales that would be impractical on Earth.
Taken together, the pieces are starting to click into place. Tesla builds the chips. Dojo scales the training. SpaceX puts the compute in orbit. And xAI ties it all together at the model level. It’s an ambitious, borderline sci-fi vision, but one that Musk is now backing with a concrete silicon roadmap.
