{"id":326515,"date":"2025-08-08T00:19:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T00:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/326515\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T00:19:11","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T00:19:11","slug":"tesla-shuts-down-dojo-the-ai-training-supercomputer-that-musk-said-would-be-key-to-full-self-driving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/326515\/","title":{"rendered":"Tesla shuts down Dojo, the AI training supercomputer that Musk said would be key to full self-driving"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tesla is breaking up the team behind its Dojo supercomputer<\/a>, ending the automaker\u2019s play at developing in-house chips for driverless technology, according to Bloomberg<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Dojo\u2019s lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving the company, and the remaining team members will be reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, per Bloomberg\u2019s reporting, which cited anonymous sources.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The disbanding of Tesla\u2019s Dojo efforts follows the departure of around 20 workers, who left the automaker to start their own AI company called DensityAI<\/a>. The new startup is reportedly coming out of stealth soon and is building chips, hardware, and software that will power data centers for AI that are used in robotics, by AI agents, and in automotive applications. DensityAI was founded by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan<\/a> and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering.<\/p>\n

It also comes at a crucial time for Tesla. <\/p>\n

CEO Elon Musk has pushed <\/a>to get shareholders to view Tesla as an AI and robotics company, despite a limited robotaxi launch in Austin this past June that featured Model Y vehicles with a human in the front passenger seat and resulted in a number of reported incidents of the vehicles exhibiting problematic driving behavior.<\/p>\n

Tesla\u2019s decision to shut down Dojo, which Musk has been talking about since 2019, is a major shift in strategy. Musk has said that Dojo would be the cornerstone of Tesla\u2019s AI ambitions and its goal to reach full self-driving due to its ability to \u201cprocess truly vast amounts of video data.\u201d\u00a0He talked about Dojo, albeit briefly, as recently as the company\u2019s second-quarter earnings call.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Morgan Stanley predicted Dojo could add $500 billion to the company\u2019s market value by unlocking new revenue streams in the form of robotaxis and software services. Just last year, Musk noted that Tesla\u2019s AI team would \u201cdouble down<\/a>\u201d on Dojo in the lead-up to Tesla\u2019s robotaxi reveal,<\/a> which happened in October.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Techcrunch event<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t|
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 27-29, 2025\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

But talk about Dojo halted around August 2024, when Musk began touting Cortex instead, Tesla\u2019s \u201cgiant new AI training supercluster being built at Tesla HQ in Austin to solve real-world AI.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Dojo project was one part supercomputer, one part in-house chip-making. Tesla unveiled its D1 chip when it formally announced Dojo at its first AI Day in 2021. Venkataramanan<\/a> presented the chip, which Tesla said would be used alongside Nvidia\u2019s GPU to power the Dojo supercomputer. The automaker also said it was working on a next-gen D2 chip that would solve any information flow bottlenecks of its predecessor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sources told Bloomberg that now Tesla plans to increase its reliance on Nvidia, as well as other external tech partners like AMD for compute and Samsung for chip manufacturing. Tesla last month signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung<\/a> to make its AI6 inference chips, a chip design that promises to scale from powering FSD and Tesla\u2019s Optimus humanoid robots all the way to high-performance AI training in data centers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During Tesla\u2019s second-quarter earnings call, Musk hinted at potential redundancies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThinking about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it seems like intuitively, we want to try to find convergence there, where it\u2019s basically the same chip,\u201d Musk said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The news comes as Tesla\u2019s board offers Musk a $29 billion pay package<\/a> to keep him at Tesla and help push the company\u2019s AI efforts forward, rather than getting too sidetracked by his other companies, including the more pure-play AI startup xAI.\u00a0<\/p>\n

TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla for more information. <\/p>\n

Have a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We\u2019re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry \u2014 from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com and Maxwell Zeff at maxwell.zeff@techcrunch.com. For secure communication, you can contact us via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tesla is breaking up the team behind its Dojo supercomputer, ending the automaker\u2019s play at developing in-house chips…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":326516,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3163],"tags":[323,1942,60790,117654,295,117655,53,298,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-326515","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-autonomous-vehicles","11":"tag-dojo","12":"tag-elon-musk","13":"tag-robotaxis","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-tesla","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114990282347687271","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=326515"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/326515\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/326516"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=326515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=326515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=326515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}