Elon Musk Believes Semiconductor Shortage Will Be Solved Soon

While most experts from the semiconductor industry have said that the global shortage of chips could last as long as 2 years, Tesla CEO and co-founder, Elon Musk believes this to be more of a short-term issue. Recently, at the IAA Mobility conference, Intel's CEO Pat Gelsinger revealed that the chip shortage issue was getting fixed but - it wasn't a quick fix with facilities being created for fabrication of new semiconductors taking years, then months to come to fruition. Gelsinger also shed light on how the electric car was like a computer with wheels which would fuel further dependencies on the chip industry. But Musk is rather nonchalant about this issue. He talks more about rudimentary microcontroller chips which are a major chunk of the shortage but compares the situation to that of a washroom running out of toilet paper. 

"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 obviously not a long-term issue," said the billionaire. 

Intel's CEO predicts the semiconductor crisis will continue for a couple of years 

"There's a lot of chip fabrication plants that are being built and I think we will have the good capacity by next year," he added, though his views are overly optimistic considering chipset fabs take multiple years to become operational. 

But his comments also come after Tesla mostly avoided being massively impacted by the global semiconductor crisis. "In Q1, we were able to navigate through global chip supply shortage issues in part by pivoting extremely quickly to new microcontrollers, while simultaneously developing firmware for new chips made by new suppliers," he added. 

There have been reports which claim that Tesla even considered buying its chipset factory to gain control of the situation -- but likely that plan didn't materialize as it would have been a huge investment and would add to headcount and assets on its books that it may not be well adept at fostering.