Rising memory-chip prices are adding "many hundreds of dollars" to the cost of each Rivian vehicle, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe said at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, as AI data centers soak up the same parts carmakers need. "In the case of a vehicle that has a lot of capability, you're adding many hundreds of dollars in costs with the price of memory going up so much," he said, according to EV (eletric-vehicles.com), which reported the remarks on Monday, Oct. 19, 2026.

"That was not something 12 months ago, 18 months ago, you would have predicted," Scaringe said, adding that "everyone who has products that have any sort of electronics is dealing with this."

How Rivian is responding

  • Use less memory: "One is you fight very, very hard to get the amount of memory in every product down," he said, calling it "a tactical exercise."
  • More suppliers: "The other is building lots of potential supply paths, so multiple different suppliers providing memory."
  • Pay more anyway: "And then at the end you're paying more," he said.

Scaringe said the supply chain was "by far" the biggest challenge in ramping the R2, which started a second production shift in Normal, Illinois, before the end of September. "We have cost structures that have gone up dramatically around the physical world, largely driven by the demand for a lot of those same resources for building data centers," he said. Rivian had already flagged memory as a cost headwind on its July 30 earnings call without putting a number on it, and it guides to an adjusted EBITDA loss of $1.8 billion to $2.0 billion this year, EV reports.

Autonomy, personal ownership and an R4

In a separate TechCrunch interview published Monday, Scaringe said autonomy will let Rivian build radically different vehicles. "Where it gets really interesting is when you think beyond R2 and R3 and start to imagine the form factors that you want to build for a personally-owned autonomous vehicle," he said. "It can create dramatically different experiences."

He argued most self-driving miles will still be in privately owned cars: "95% of the miles driven in the United States... are in things that we personally own," and that share "may go from 95% to 90%, it may go from 95% to 80%" even with Level 4 systems. Asked what that car looks like, he gave only a name: "The thing after R3 is going to be called R4 — we just haven't shown what it looks like."

Rivian has promised supervised point-to-point driving by the end of 2026 and plans robotaxi versions of the R2 on Uber's app, TechCrunch notes. We covered the invite-only Point-to-Point early access program last week.

What it means for Tesla

Tesla faces the same chip squeeze and is answering it by building supply itself. In its 2026 proxy statement filed Monday, Tesla told shareholders that "our recent investments in battery and chip manufacturing, including our Terafab initiative, will help secure the supply of critical components." See our coverage of Terafab's chipmaking timeline. Tesla's autonomy bet also differs from Scaringe's view: the same letter says Tesla began producing the dedicated, driverless Cybercab at Gigafactory Texas this year.