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by stetrain
1768 days ago
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I don't think it's profitable to build a leading edge chip fab with only yourself as the customer. At least, nobody else is doing it. Even with Intel's huge sales volumes they are still trying to bring in other customers to use their fabs to share the cost. So I think getting in the fab business for Tesla would mean trying to be a direct competitor with TSMC, Intel, etc. by making chips for a large number of customers. That seems way down the list of Tesla's priorities and best uses of dropping hundreds of billions of dollars. |
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Intel reportedly produces roughly 10 million wafers per year [1]. Roughly 70 million new cars are sold per year [2], with Tesla currently accounting for 0.5 million of those [3] with roughly 50% YOY growth numbers and a plan on continuing those for multiple years [4].
Cars/wafer is a pretty unclear number, at 5 Tesla is 1% of Intel's market (today), at 25 0.2% of Intel's market. It will take quite awhile for Tesla to hit intel's scale - but the automotive market as a whole might actually be pretty close to it if all new cars start including giant computers.
[1] 884k/month * 12 months/year, from https://www.eenewseurope.com/news/top-five-chip-makers-domin...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/200002/international-car...
[3] https://backlinko.com/tesla-stats (or see [4] but then you have to add up quarters yourself)
[4] https://tesla-cdn.thron.com/static/ZBOUYO_TSLA_Q2_2021_Updat...