Subjects / China
7 answers
“For sure in 2027, but if China ramps LP5 & LP6 as fast as they’ve ramped other manufactured products, then 2028 will be a different story. HBM is a tougher hill to climb, however.”
— Elon Musk, 16 October 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive
“When China figures out how to manufacture a product, their ability to scale is often greater than the rest of the world combined. We saw this with lithium batteries and solar, for example. SpaceX is a rare counter-example, where its mass to orbit is roughly an order of magnitude greater than the rest of the world, BUT China now does a majority of non-SpaceX mass to orbit. SpaceX is an anomaly in the matrix. Maybe RAM will be different, but RAM was a low margin commodity only ~3 years ago. LP5 and LP6 are designed to a common standard that China seems to be solving fast. Newer HBM architectures and things like an SRAM layer below logic and 3D stacking RAM on top of logic while finding a way to keep the logic cooled will be harder to solve.”
— Elon Musk, 12 October 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive
“Yeah, I will be surprised if domestic chip production in China is not competitive with Taiwan in raw compute, albeit less power efficient, within 3 to 5 years. There are also significant diminishing returns to reducing element size on a chip and some things, like SRAM, just don’t scale down.”
— Elon Musk, 2 March 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive
“China is moving rapidly to a solar/electric future with very little need for oil or gas”
— Elon Musk, 1 March 2026 · Post on X ↗ · In the archive
“…some sort of humanoid recursive miracle…”
— Elon Musk, 5 February 2026 · Watch: YouTube (1:41:23) ↗ · In the archive
“…the United States should not have such a severe dependency on China for drones and be unable to make them unless China gives us the parts.”
— Elon Musk, 22 April 2025 · Watch: Tesla Q1 2025 earnings call (2025) · 1:31:55 ↗ · In the archive
“…we're making sure that we can continue to manufacture Our stuff, even in the event of geopolitical tensions rising to very high levels.”
— Elon Musk, 29 January 2025 · Watch: Tesla Q4 and full year 2024 earnings call (2025) · 1:02:41 ↗ · In the archive