"Our biggest challenge is supply chain, especially microcontroller chips. Never seen anything like it. Fear of running out is causing every company to overorder – like the toilet paper shortage, but at epic scale. That said, it’s obv not a long-term issue," Musk wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
At the end of May, the Financial Times reported that Tesla was considering buying a plant to produce semiconductors as part of its efforts to secure supply amid global shortages. Sources cited by the paper said the company intended to pay for chips in advance and was discussing proposals to secure chip supplies with industry operators in Taiwan, South Korea, as well as at home, in the United States.
In April, Musk said the current chip shortage was a major problem for Tesla, which has its own engineering team that designs the high-end semiconductors used in autonomous driving.
