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NVIDIA says Tesla raised the bar for self-driving tech, car makers must deliver
NVIDIA, a prominent and highly successful leader in computer chip design, says that Tesla has raised the bar in autonomous driving software, and other car makers will have to deliver similar performance if they want to compete in the long-term future of the auto industry, according to a recent NVIDIA company blog.
“It’s financially insane to buy anything other than a Tesla,” CEO Elon Musk stated during the company’s Autonomy Day event. He then compared the purchase of any other car as equivalent to buying a horse for one’s transportation purposes. NVIDIA, for its part, agrees with Musk and Tesla’s sentiments about the future of self-driving and the need for powerful computers to push its progress.
“Self-driving cars—which are key to new levels of safety, efficiency, and convenience—are the future of the industry. And they require massive amounts of computing performance… This is the way forward. Every other automaker will need to deliver this level of performance,” the chip maker wrote.
The type of autonomous driving technology Tesla is pushing is predicted to be the inevitable standard, and the company’s lead in the arena will likely increase even further as more of their vehicles take to the road. “By end of this quarter, about half a million Teslas will have full self-driving hardware (pending computer swap) & we will make another half million FSD cars by mid next year,” Musk tweeted, emphasizing this point and echoing what he’d explained the day prior.
Exactly. By end of this quarter, about half a million Teslas will have full self-driving hardware (pending computer swap) & we will make another half million FSD cars by mid next year.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 23, 2019
Tesla’s recent Autonomy Day presentation drew comparisons between the all-electric car maker’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) computer chip and those produced by NVIDIA, the only computer processing unit maker delivering performance in line with Tesla’s. NVIDIA currently has two self-driving chips in the works: the Xavier SoC (system on a chip) for assisted driving AutoPilot features, and the DRIVE AGX Pegasus computer for full self-driving. The comparisons in Tesla’s presentation were directed at the Xavier in a single-chip configuration.
The technical performance specifications required to run powerful artificial intelligence (AI) neural networks (NN) for autonomous driving require operations performed per second to be measured in the trillions – abbreviated as TOPS (tera operations per second). Tesla’s FSD computer chip can perform at a rate of 72 TOPS (x2 chips in the computer for 144 TOPS total), and the Xavier does 30 TOPS (mistakenly claimed to be 21 TOPS at Tesla’s event, per NVIDIA’s blog).
NVIDIA also expressed in the blog piece its opinion that the match between FSD and Xavier wasn’t quite an apples-to-apples comparison, given the purposes of the two chips. The chip designer prefers its DRIVE AGX Pegasus for the line-up, a computer intended for fully autonomous driving and capable of 320 TOPS. Tesla is assumingly aware of this product and obviously acknowledges the high level of technology developed by NVIDIA given that Hardware 2.5, the computer currently running Tesla’s Autopilot features, was made by the company.
A Tesla with driver features “deleted” under the Tesla Network. | Image: Tesla
There are additional specifications such as power consumption that further differentiate FSD from NVIDIA’s products with a more similar purpose to Tesla’s latest computer. Thus, a different product match may not have mattered towards the overall point being made in the presentation. Either way, a more important distinction between the two companies is the current status of their technologies.
Tesla’s chip was crowned as “objectively the best in the world” by Musk, and this looks to be true, given the fact that all Tesla Model S, 3, and X vehicles being produced now have the hardware installed and will add to the already accruing real world self-driving data the company’s cars provide. NVIDIA has partnered with other car manufacturers to develop its products, but they are not incorporated in production vehicles the way Tesla’s FSD has been yet.
The performance Tesla has achieved in its FSD computer is impressive, and that was and continues to be the point. “[Autonomy] is basically our entire expense structure,” Musk told an investor inquiring about where the California-based company was incurring the most cost. Tesla is hedging its fiscal future on the success of autonomous driving in the marketplace, and the company is doing so with bullish energy driven by its famous top executive.
Musk expects Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to be complete by the end of this year and fully operational by the second quarter of next year.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
