During Tesla’s Q3 2025 earnings call, the firm’s CEO, Elon Musk, proposed that the cars take part in “a giant distributed inference fleet” to tap into their incredible compute power “if they are bored.” Musk went on to estimate that, at some point, the advanced car fleet could summon “100 gigawatts of inference.”
Musk answered that an annualized production rate of three million vehicles should be achievable within 24 months. He added that the “single biggest expansion in production will be the Cyber Cab, which starts production in Q2 next year.” This will be a comfort-optimized automated transport vehicle, obviously targeting the cab market.
Using talk of computing power as a springboard, Musk then openly pondered whether the upcoming systems “might almost be too much intelligence for a car.” To address the decidedly first-world problem of owning a car “that might get bored,” the Tesla CEO went off on an interesting tangent about tapping into idle car processing power, effectively turning the Tesla fleet into a giant distributed inference network.
“One of the things I thought: if we got all these cars that maybe are bored… we could actually have a giant distributed inference fleet,” Musk said.
Obviously, plucking numbers from the air, the Tesla boss went on to optimistically project that this fleet could expand to, say, 100 million vehicles, with a baseline of a kilowatt of inference capability per vehicle. “That’s 100 gigawatts of inference distributed with power and cooling taken with cooling and power conversion taken care of,” Musk told the financial experts on the earnings call. “So that seems like a pretty significant asset.”
At its core, Musk’s idea beckons comparisons with classical distributed computing platforms, like SETI@home and Folding@home. But this Tesla fleet proposal could make an interesting commercial moon shoot idea for investors and business analysts.
Meanwhile, users will probably be more concerned about their bought and paid for vehicles being used for someone else’s advantage, perhaps using extra electricity, and their computer systems enduring longer heat stress, and so on. There’d probably have to be a clear benefit for end-users to incentivize them to sign up to such a compute power-sharing scheme.
(ed: This article is addressing the computing power within the vehicle but there is also the battery energy that is sitting idle most of the time.)