Tesla Inc. (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk threw some cold water on the excitement around Nvidia Corp's (NVDA) latest chip unveiling, suggesting the technology still has a ways to go before it's ready for prime time.

The Rubin Reality Check

On Monday, influencer Sawyer Merritt shared a video highlighting Nvidia's new Vera Rubin chips, which made their debut at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2026. The specs are genuinely impressive: the new architecture ditches fans and cables entirely while promising performance up to five times more powerful than the preceding Blackwell chip. Each rack packs 72 Rubin chips, with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang describing them as two GPUs connected together.

But Musk, who runs both Tesla and SpaceX, wasn't swept up in the hype. Responding to Merritt's post, he estimated it would take "another 9 months" before the technology becomes "operational at scale" with software that actually functions smoothly. In other words, what looks good on a CES stage isn't necessarily ready for deployment.

The Self-Driving Skepticism

Nvidia also used the event to showcase Alpamayo, its new self-driving technology featuring a vision-language-action approach. Huang called it the "ChatGPT moment" for self-driving, which is quite the claim in an industry that's been promising autonomous vehicles are just around the corner for years now.

Musk's take? The distribution challenge would be "super hard" for Nvidia to solve. Tesla's AI Chief, Ashok Elluswamy, backed up that assessment. Still, Musk extended an olive branch of sorts, wishing Nvidia success in developing self-driving car technology. Competition is fine, but he's clearly not losing sleep over it.

Tesla's Chip Ambitions

There's a reason Musk is comfortable being skeptical: Tesla is building its own AI chips. The company has been working on in-house hardware development, with Musk previously claiming these efforts would enable Tesla to produce more chipsets than any competitor. He's even announced a major hiring push to support the chip-building operation.

It's a classic vertical integration play. Why depend on Nvidia's timeline when you can control your own destiny? Of course, building competitive AI chips is monumentally difficult, which is why Nvidia dominates the market in the first place. But if anyone's going to try, it's probably the guy who decided to start a rocket company because he thought space launch costs were too high.

Price Action: TSLA declined 0.14% to $451.05 during the after-hours trading session.