Tesla discontinues in-house AI project Dojo

Tesla discontinues its in-house Dojo supercomputer project. Its team leader Peter Bannon is leaving the company. Dojo, which was based on the self-developed D1 chip, was used by the US car manufacturer for AI training to improve the autopilot functions and Full Self Driving (FSD) in Tesla vehicles. According to media reports, there was rumbling in the now closed department even before CEO Elon Musk's decision. 20 employees are said to have moved to a new start-up company called DensityAI. The remaining employees are to be assigned to other projects at Tesla.

The development of Dojo began in 2019. At the time, Musk justified the project by saying that supercomputers were mostly designed for general purposes at the time. Tesla also hoped to achieve independence from Nvidia GPUs and lower costs. If successful, Dojo could also have been a unique selling point to gain an innovative edge over competitors in the automotive market. Even then, however, there was talk of a "long shot" with a high risk. Tesla apparently no longer wants to take this risk.

Focus on AI5 and AI6

Dojo, whose name was an allusion to martial arts training rooms, was to serve a special purpose and be optimized for this purpose. In addition to processing millions of terabytes of video data from the Tesla vehicle fleet, the supercomputer was also to be used for the further development of the humanoid Optimus robots. There is a data center in Buffalo, New York, where version 1 of Dojo is located.

Musk explained in an X-Post that splitting resources between two different AI chip designs does not make sense. Tesla now wants to focus on the AI5 and AI6 autoprocessors and subsequent chips, which should be suitable for both inference and "at least quite well" for training. The manufacturer is now aiming to work more closely with Nvidia and AMD. Samsung's own processors from the AI6 generation onwards are produced by Samsung's chip manufacturing division, with which Tesla has signed an agreement worth 16.5 billion US dollars until 2033.

Meanwhile, the public announcement comes abruptly: on July 23, 2025, Musk emphasized in an analyst conference that Tesla plans to ramp up Dojo 2 next year. At the time, the company boss was even more optimistic about AI6's training capabilities. He described the combination of many such chips as an option for a Dojo 3. Just a few days ago, rumors were circulating that Intel's manufacturing division could combine some AI6 chips on a carrier to form Dojo boards.

Mysterious start-up

It remains to be seen how the departure of several employees to DensityAI will affect Tesla. At present, it is still a so-called stealth start-up, i.e. a young company that is still working in secret. The US financial news agency Bloomberg reports that DensityAI is planning to develop chips, hardware and software that can be used for robotics, AI agents and in the automotive sector. The company was founded by a former senior employee of the Dojo project at Tesla and other ex-Tesla employees.

(mki)