Asia Tech Wire (Oct 25) -- Tesla is in talks with SK hynix about ordering 1 trillion won ($725 million) of enterprise solid-state drives (eSSDs), according to KED Global.

Thursday's report said chip industry sources confirmed Tesla's talks with SK hynix about the eSSD order.

As the industry's demand for AI chips has exploded, demand for eSSDs, which can quickly process massive amounts of data, has soared, becoming a core part of AI chips alongside HBM (high bandwidth memory) chips.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in July that Tesla would work on its Dojo supercomputer due to its current over-reliance on Nvidia, from which GPUs are expensive.

To fast-track its AI, Dojo will need high-performance storage devices such as eSSDs capable of storing, reading and writing massive amounts of data.

According to Solidigm, a U.S. subsidiary of SK hynix, eSSDs can save up to one-fifth of the electricity bill and reduce total costs by 46% in five years compared to traditional hard disk drives (HDDs).

Solidigm has developed the industry's highest capacity 60 TB eSSD and has supplied it to many large technology companies.