Elon’s Big Nvidia Pivot Is A Gamble That Could Affect Both Companies – Money Digest

On January 17, 2026, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced, via X, that the electric vehicle manufacturer’s long-awaited AI5 chip — which is predicted to be an instrumental component in the artificial intelligence (AI) powering the company’s future autonomous vehicles (AVs) — was nearing completion. In fact, Tesla‘s Q4 2025 Update Deck predicts that the AI5 chip will be ready for mass production in 2027 and its follow-up, AI6, should be available the following year. Adding to this, Musk made another major announcement on the AI front: Tesla would once again be directing resources toward developing its previously scrapped Dojo 3 program, an AI computing system based in space.

These reveals came just weeks after the AI computing corporation, Nvidia, announced Alpamayo — a collection of open source AV-focused AI programs and resources. Tesla currently relies heavily on Nvidia’s hardware to train its AI, and has for several years. In fact, Musk shared on X that Tesla is on…