Tesla has closed its Dojo supercomputer project, which the CEO, Elon Musk, previously described as the foundation of the company’s full self-driving efforts. The automaker is shutting down the Dojo team, according to Bloomberg, with its head, Peter Bannon, leaving the company. The rest of the members will be transferred to other Tesla compute and data center projects.
This move comes after the loss of around 20 former Dojo engineers who left to start up DensityAI, a startup set to launch soon that will create chips, hardware, and AI data center software to be used in robotics, AI agents, and automotive technology. Its founders are former Dojo chief Ganesh Venkataramanan and former Tesla workers Bill Chang and Ben Floering.
First announced in 2019 and publicly revealed at Tesla AI Day in 2021, Dojo integrated in-house chip design with massive AI compute. The custom D1 chip Tesla created was intended to handle “truly vast amounts of video data” to further autonomous driving. To eliminate bottlenecks, a next-generation D2 chip was planned, but the project seems to be shelved.
The shift is timely. Musk has attempted to position Tesla as an AI and robotics firm, yet its recent partial rollout of robotaxis in Austin last June, using Model Y vehicles with human safety passengers, was marred by reports of unstable driving. In 2023, analysts, such as Morgan Stanley, speculated that Dojo could release up to 500 billion in market value in the form of robotaxi and software services.
By August 2024, Musk publicly changed the emphasis of his attention to Cortex, a new AI training supercluster being built at the Tesla headquarters in Austin. Tesla is now expected to deepen its reliance on Nvidia GPUs, AMD, and Samsung, with a $16.5 billion deal recently signed with Samsung to produce its AI6 inference chips, designed to serve both FSD (Full Self-Driving) and the Optimus humanoid robot, as well as high-performance AI training.
Musk has suggested combining the AI6 and Dojo ambitions into one architecture, but the termination of Dojo is a consolidation, not a growth. The shake-up follows the Tesla board proposing a $29 billion payout to Musk as a way to ensure he remains focused on the Tesla AI roadmap amidst the competition his other companies, such as AI startup xAI, pose to Tesla.