A Tesla car charges at a Tesla Supercharger station on March 30, 2026 in Pasadena, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
tesla Shares rose nearly 8% to close at $391.95 per share on Wednesday after CEO Elon Musk touted advances in the company’s upcoming AI5 chip.
In a post on his social network X, Musk said the chip had reached important engineering milestones and was close to mass production.
Tesla also plans to partner with SpaceX to build two advanced chip factories in Austin, Texas. One will make chips for vehicles and robots, and the other will make chips for use in orbital data centers.
Intel recently joined the Tesla-SpaceX Terafab project.
Analysts at UBS on Tuesday raised their rating on the stock from “sell” to “hold” and raised their price target by about $1 to $352. The stock rose more than 3% on Tuesday and is up more than 12% so far this week.
UBS analysts led by Joseph Spack wrote in an upgrade that news that Tesla is developing a new small SUV is a “welcome development” given the company’s view that Tesla’s current small car lineup is “too limited”.
The company’s lineup currently includes the Model 3 sedan, Model Y SUV, and the angular steel Cybertruck. The company has suspended sales of its main vehicles, the Model S and Model X, in order to transfer part of its Fremont, California, factory to production of the humanoid robot Optimus, which is currently under development.
The rise in stock prices was also due to Tesla starting a spring update to its in-vehicle software. This includes features that make it easier for customers to subscribe to the company’s premium Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option and view statistics on its usage frequency on the touchscreen.
FSD (Supervised) currently costs $99 per month in the US and can handle some steering, lane changes, and parking automatically under active supervision of the driver. FSD (supervised) does not make a Tesla autonomous.
The company is testing a small number of self-driving cars at its ride-hailing service Robotaxi in Austin, Texas.
The spring software update also includes changes to the in-vehicle capabilities of Grok, an AI chatbot developed by Musk’s xAI, which is now owned by his rocket maker SpaceX. Drivers can now launch the app by saying “Hey Grok” and use it hands-free in their Tesla EV.
For more than a decade, Mr. Musk has promised that Tesla is on the verge of offering self-driving, or “robotaxi-enabled,” vehicles to customers. The system is evolving, but it’s not here yet.
—CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
