Tesla is building its own AI chips for self-driving cars

"We've been in semi-stealth mode on this basically for the last 2-3 years," said Elon Musk on an earnings call today. "I think it's probably time to let the cat out of the bag…" Otherwise known as "Hardware 3", it's a Tesla-built piece of hardware meant to be swapped into the Model S, X, and 3 to do all the number crunching required to advance those cars' self-driving capabilities. Tesla has thus far relied on Nvidia's Drive platform. By building things in-house, Tesla say it's able to focus on its own needs for the sake of efficiency. "We had the benefit […] of knowing what our neural networks look like, and what they'll look like in the future," said Pete Bannon, director of the Hardware 3 project.