Tesla has just announced the contract of the century with Samsung for its future AI6 fleas (HW6). But this is not necessarily going to please the owners of the current Tesla. The latter may depreciate if the manufacturer does nothing.
When Elon Musk announces a partnership at $ 16.5 billion with Samsung to provide the HW6 (or AI6) fleas of future Tesla cars, he talks about a major industrial turning point. The new Samsung factory in Texas will be dedicated to the exclusive manufacture of these processors for eight years, until 2033 as we can read on X (ex-Twitter) and in a press release.
Samsung, in full rout in the field of “Foundries”, sees there the opportunity to finally convince the market and to straighten its colossal losses in the first half of 2025 on the production part of fleas. Musk assures that he will personally participate in optimizing the production chain, since the factory is ” Not far from home ».
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The future hw6 chip will be the conductor of future Tesla cars, allowing in particular to benefit from more power for driving aids and therefore 100 % autonomous driving like the FSD which arrives in Europe. The announcement of the year? “Few people understand it” specifies Musk on X.
The big novelty is that the HW6 chip would be used by many Tesla products: vehicles, robots and datacenters, thanks to the brand design.
A good or bad news?
Behind the industrial logic, however indisputable, this mega-contract revives a concern in part of the Tesla drivers. Those who still roll with a car equipped with HW3 hardware (the Tesla until 2020), or even HW4 (since 2021) for the most recent, observe with a touch of bitterness this technological front leak.
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Not because they reject progress (that is often why they have chosen Tesla) but because they have still not seen the promises that accompanied their own generation of vehicle as it does not Elecrektrek.
The HW3 case is particularly sensitive. Sold in 2016 with the promise of full compatibility with the future full self-driving (entirely autonomous driving capacity in French), this calculator quickly found itself lagging behind.
Admittedly, Elon Musk ended up admitting, at the beginning of 2025, that a replacement for the HW4 would be necessary to keep the initial promise. But in fact, nothing has moved since. There are many vehicles concerned, and if an exchange of equipment is actually provided for those who have subscribed to the FSD pack for several thousand euros, the calendar, the technical conditions and the feasibility remain very vague.
Why already think of HW5 and HW6?
As for the HW4, introduced more recently, it is not yet officially obsolete, but we imagine that it begins to show its limits in internal tests. The fact that Tesla passes so quickly, with the HW5 which should arrive in 2026 then HW6 now secure, leaves a doubt. How long will these intermediate generations benefit from the best of homemade algorithms?
It is not a question here of throwing stone into a company that is advancing quickly. Tesla’s development cadence remains unparalleled in the automotive industry, and hardware follows a logic that we know well in tech: iterative, fast, sometimes brutal for previous generations. But this is precisely where the thread is handled.
Tesla sells cars that last a good ten years, not smartphones with a shorter rhythm of life. And the promise of software update for life, if it remains an undeniable force of the brand, assumes that the equipment holds the road longer than a few years.
This contract with Samsung is therefore excellent news for Tesla and for future cars. It secures the future, opens the way to a new era of powerful, integrated autonomous vehicles, without compromise on the computing power.
But it also accentuates an impression of offset for part of the installed base. An impression, not yet a certainty. Everything will depend on what Tesla will do in the coming months to clarify its commitments to the current owners of HW3 and HW4.
Because if the strategy remains unclear, the suspicion of planned obsolescence, even involuntary, could quickly reflect. And on the second -hand market, cars stamped HW3 or HW4 could then lose value for buyers interested in autonomous driving.
