Tesla shuts down in-house Dojo AI supercomputer project

As first reported by Bloomberg, Tesla is disbanding the team behind Dojo, its in-house AI-training supercomputer, and reassigning remaining staff to other projects within the company. This marks a shift in the company's compute sourcing strategy for its AI-focused initiatives such as autonomous driving and the Optimus robot. Head of Dojo Peter Bannon is leaving Tesla, which is the latest departure after roughly 20 Dojo team members recently left to form DensityAI.

In a response to the Bloomberg report on X, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said, "It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs. The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that."

Musk is referring to Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip that will be made by Samsung following a $16.5 billion deal. These chips will drive the real-time decision-making onboard Tesla vehicles and robots. Shutting down Dojo effectively ends Tesla's long-shot ambition of creating its own in-house training architecture and consolidates the company's efforts on the AI5 and AI6 platforms.

While Musk says these chips are "pretty good" for training, the company will now rely heavily on vendors like NVIDIA for training-specific silicon, and is spending billions on those chips. AI5 production is targeted to begin in 2026 with AI6 to follow.

Like the rest of the big tech world, Musk's companies have been on an AI tear, with xAI's Grok chatbot now available in Tesla vehicles. The company is also piloting its Robotaxi fleet to mixed results.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/tesla-shuts-down-in-house-dojo-ai-supercomputer-project-155420734.html?src=rss https://www.engadget.com/ai/tesla-shuts-down-in-house-dojo-ai-supercomputer-project-155420734.html?src=rss