Elon Musk meets with Lee Jae-yong to talk about automotive chips

For the first time ever, the CEO of Tesla and Samsung Electronics chairman have met. The meeting was held during Lee Jae-yong’s recent business trip to the US. Reportedly, the two executives have discussed the possible collaboration approaches on automotive semiconductor chips. The meeting was organized at Samsung Research America headquarters located in Silicon Valley, California, USA.

The recent pieces of information suggest that the two heads have discussed about the likelihood of Samsung Foundry developing semiconductor chips for Tesla’s self-driving cars. Some reports even indicate that Tesla is working on its own processor that will be sued to power FSD (Fully Self-Driving) cars. Samsung Foundry could get the contract for it. There is a chance for this since the meeting was also attended by Kyung Gye-hyun (CEO of Samsung Semiconductor) and Choi Si-young (President & GM, Samsung Foundry).

For Tesla’s electric self-driving cars, Samsung already provides a large number of components

Well, this is not the very first time that the two companies will collaborate. Samsung provides several components for Tesla’s electric cars. These include the batteries from Samsung SDI, camera sensors System LSI, and Exynos Auto chips. The South Korean tech giant is already manufacturing chips for Tesla. They are being made on the 14nm process in Austin, Texas, USA. reports suggest that the future chips will be based on the 5nm fabrication process of Samsung Foundry.

Well, there is no official information about the contract as yet. There is a possibility that Samsung might get this contract. Previously, some reports suggested that Tesla could choose TSMC over Samsung for chip contracts.