Tesla has cut RAM on its upcoming AI5 chip from 144GB to 72GB and reduced AI6 from 216GB to 144GB, a move Elon Musk says is necessary to secure enough memory for high-volume Optimus production while lowering costs.
Musk said Thursday the AI5 chip will now use 72GB of LP5 memory, half the amount Tesla had previously planned, while AI6 will use 144GB of LP6, a one-third reduction from its earlier 216GB configuration.
“We cut our RAM in half for the Tesla AI5 chip (now 72GB of LP5) and 1/3 for AI6 (now 144GB of LP6). This was the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production and greatly reduces cost. As it turns out, we think this will have a negligible effect on Optimus performance, as memory bandwidth is a bigger limiting factor than total memory storage (bandwidth was held constant),” Musk said.
AI5 is Tesla’s next-generation in-house AI chip for vehicles and Optimus, while AI6 is set to follow it. The change suggests Tesla is optimizing the chips not only around computing performance, but also around the physical supply constraints involved in producing humanoid robots at large scale.
Musk was responding to an estimate that assumed roughly 200GB of RAM per humanoid robot and pointed out that global DRAM production is about 45 billion GB per year. At a hypothetical scale of 10 billion robots using 200GB each, memory supply would become an obvious bottleneck.
That is the problem Tesla is trying to address before Optimus reaches mass production. Cutting memory capacity lets the company stretch available DRAM across more robots while also reducing hardware cost.
According to Musk, the trade-off should have little effect on Optimus performance because memory bandwidth is more restrictive than total storage capacity, and Tesla has kept bandwidth unchanged.
The shift also offers an early indication of how Tesla may engineer Optimus for manufacturing scale. As production targets rise, component availability and cost could matter as much as headline chip specifications, making AI5 and AI6 increasingly about delivering sufficient performance with hardware that Tesla can actually source in enormous quantities.
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