Tesla (TSLA) and Nvidia (NVDA) have an interesting relationship that features both collaboration and competition. Nvidia recently announced that it plans to work with Mercedes-Benz to launch an autonomous car to compete with Tesla. However, Elon Musk recently said Nvidia’s new autonomous driving models will not pose serious competition to Tesla’s FSD technology for at least five to six years.

In addition, Musk recently explained why Tesla was about to drop $10 billion on components from Nvidia. Moreover, Musk also explained why that price tag would have had to double, if not for one key point. Musk detailed that the $10 billion buy would have ballooned to $20 billion if it had not been for Nvidia’s AI4 chipset. With Tesla on track to make two million cars a year—and growing, no less—it would require a lot more hardware to build. And without the AI4 chipset, Tesla would have had to buy twice as much hardware just to train AI systems.

Nvidia’s new Alpamayo open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models are specifically designed for training autonomous vehicles and improving full self-driving capabilities. “This is our first Nvidia first entire stack endeavor,” Huang said about the Mercedes partnership in his presentation. “We’ve been working on it for this entire time, and I’m just so happy that the first AV car from Nvidia is going to be on the road in Q1.” He also went on to add: “There’s no question in my mind now that this is going to be one of the largest robotics industries, and I’m so happy that we worked on it. And it taught us an enormous amount about how to help the rest of the world build robotic systems.”

The move to incorporate Nvidia’s AI technology could put a target on the backs of Elon Musk’s Tesla (TSLA). The latter has pushed hard towards being the leader of autonomous vehicles. However, lacking Nvidia’s powerful and highly rated AI chips, Tesla could fall behind Mercedes. The one thing that Elon Musk’s EV giant has going for it is the popularity of Tesla models and its abundance of models already ready for consumers. Alternatively, some suggest that Tesla and Nvidia could benefit from the healthy competition.