Tesla Shuts Down Dojo, The Ai Training Supercomputer That Musk Said Would Be Key To Full Self-driving

Tesla is breaking up nan squad down its Dojo supercomputer, ending nan automaker’s play astatine processing in-house chips for driverless technology, according to Bloomberg.

Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving nan company, and nan remaining squad members will beryllium reassigned to different information halfway and compute projects wrong Tesla, per Bloomberg’s reporting which cited anonymous sources. 

The disbanding of Tesla’s Dojo efforts follows nan departure of astir 20 workers, who near nan automaker to commencement their ain AI institution called DensityAI. The caller startup is reportedly coming retired of stealth soon and is building chips, hardware, and package that will powerfulness information centers for AI that are utilized successful robotics, by AI agents, and successful automotive applications. DensityAI was founded by erstwhile Dojo caput Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla labor Bill Chang and Ben Floering.

It besides comes astatine a important clip for Tesla.

CEO Elon Musk has pushed to get shareholders to position Tesla arsenic an AI and robotics company, contempt a constricted robotaxi motorboat successful Austin this past June that featured Model Y vehicles pinch a quality successful nan beforehand rider spot and resulted successful a number of reported incidents of nan vehicles exhibiting problematic driving behavior.

Tesla’s determination to unopen down Dojo, which Musk has been talking astir since 2019, is simply a awesome displacement successful strategy. CEO Elon Musk has said that Dojo would beryllium nan cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions and its extremity to scope afloat self-driving owed to its expertise to “process genuinely immense amounts of video data.” He talked astir Dojo, albeit briefly, arsenic precocious arsenic nan company’s second-quarter net call.

In 2023, Morgan Stanley predicted Dojo could adhd $500 cardinal to nan company’s marketplace worth by unlocking caller gross streams successful nan shape of robotaxis and package services. Just past year, Musk noted that Tesla’s AI squad would “double down” connected Dojo successful nan lead-up to Tesla’s robotaxi reveal, which happened successful October. 

But talk astir Dojo halted astir August 2024, erstwhile Musk began touting Cortex instead, Tesla’s “giant caller AI training supercluster being built astatine Tesla HQ successful Austin to lick real-world AI.”

The Dojo task was 1 portion supercomputer, 1 portion in-house chip-making. Tesla unveiled its D1 spot erstwhile it formally announced Dojo astatine its first AI Day successful 2021. Venkataramanan presented nan chip, which Tesla said would beryllium utilized alongside Nvidia’s GPU to powerfulness nan Dojo supercomputer. The automaker besides said it was moving connected a next-gen D2 spot that would lick immoderate accusation travel bottlenecks of its predecessor. 

Sources told Bloomberg that now Tesla plans to summation its reliance connected Nvidia, arsenic good arsenic different outer tech partners for illustration AMD for compute and Samsung for spot manufacturing. Tesla past period signed a $16.5 cardinal woody pinch Samsung to make its AI6 conclusion chips, a spot creation that promises to standard from powering FSD and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots each nan measurement to high-performance AI training successful information centers. 

During Tesla’s second-quarter net call, Musk hinted astatine imaginable redundancies. 

“Thinking astir Dojo 3 and nan AI6 conclusion chip, it seems for illustration intuitively, we want to effort to find convergence there, wherever it’s fundamentally nan aforesaid chip,” Musk said. 

The news comes arsenic Tesla’s committee offers Musk a $29 cardinal salary package to support him astatine Tesla and thief push nan company’s AI efforts forward, alternatively than getting excessively sidetracked by his different companies, including nan much pure-play AI startup xAI. 

TechCrunch has reached retired to Tesla for much information.

Have a delicate extremity aliases confidential documents? We’re reporting connected nan soul workings of nan AI manufacture — from nan companies shaping its early to nan group impacted by their decisions. Reach retired to Rebecca Bellan astatine rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com and Maxwell Zeff astatine maxwell.zeff@techcrunch.com. For unafraid communication, you tin interaction america via Signal astatine @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.