Tesla will ship its next-generation AI5 chip with 96GB of memory, reversing a cut announced just a day earlier. Elon Musk said the company nudged the spec higher to avoid being the only buyer of the minimum-density memory part.
A one-day reversal
Tesla will ship its AI5 chip with 96GB of LPDDR5 memory, Elon Musk said Friday, after the company had cut the spec to a lower figure just a day before. Musk said Tesla nudged the number up rather than rely solely on the minimum-density version of the memory.
The move follows Thursday's announcement that AI5 memory had been halved to 72GB of LP5, a change intended to secure enough supply and lower costs for the Optimus production ramp. That cut also reduced AI6 memory to 144GB of LP6, which Musk said was expected to have a negligible effect on Optimus performance.
Why Musk changed course
Musk confirmed the new figure in a reply to a post estimating that each humanoid robot would need about 200GB of RAM. He wrote that Tesla "decided to nudge AI5 up a little to 96GB" to avoid being the only company using the minimum-density version of LP5. The reply came less than a day after the original cut was announced.
AI5 is Tesla's next-generation AI inference chip, which the company has said is nearing completion and could become one of the most widely produced chips in its class. Memory supply has become a gating factor for Tesla's robotics ambitions, since Musk has predicted that humanoid robots will eventually outnumber people.
Balancing cost against standard parts
The revision shows Tesla tuning its hardware around supply-chain reality rather than raw specifications. By moving to 96GB, the company gets a more standard memory configuration that other buyers already use, preserving most of the cost and volume benefits of the original cut without committing Tesla to a unique low-density part. Tesla has been working to finalize the AI5 design ahead of the planned Optimus ramp, and the memory configuration will shape both cost and availability as production scales.
Source: TeslaNorth.com
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