For years, Elon Musk has spoken of the promise of Dojo, the AI supercomputer that was alleged to be the cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions. It was necessary sufficient to Musk that in July 2024, he mentioned the corporate’s AI staff would “double down” on Dojo within the lead-up to Tesla’s robotaxi reveal, which occurred in October.
After six years of hype, Tesla determined final month to shut down Dojo and disband the staff behind the supercomputer in August 2025. Inside weeks of projecting that Dojo 2, Tesla’s second supercluster that was meant to be constructed on the corporate’s in-house D2 chips, would attain scale by 2026, Musk reversed course, declaring it “an evolutionary useless finish.”
This text initially got down to clarify what Dojo was and the way it might assist Tesla obtain full-self driving, autonomous humanoid robots, semiconductor autonomy, and extra. Now, you possibly can consider it extra as an obituary of a challenge that satisfied so many analysts and buyers that Tesla wasn’t an automaker – it was an AI firm.
Dojo was Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that was designed to coach its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks.
Beefing up Dojo went hand-in-hand with Tesla’s aim to succeed in full self-driving and convey a robotaxi to market. FSD (Supervised) is Tesla’s superior driver help system that’s on a whole lot of hundreds of Tesla autos at the moment and may carry out some automated driving duties, however nonetheless requires a human to be attentive behind the wheel. It’s additionally the idea of comparable know-how powering Tesla’s restricted robotaxi service that the corporate launched in Austin this June utilizing Mannequin Y SUVs.
Whilst Dojo’s raison d’être began to come back to life, Tesla didn’t attribute its self-driving successes – controversial as they had been – to the supercomputer. Actually, Musk and Tesla had barely talked about Dojo at everywhere in the previous yr. In August 2024, Tesla started selling Cortex, the corporate’s “big new AI coaching supercluster being constructed at Tesla HQ in Austin to resolve real-world AI,” which Musk has mentioned would have “huge storage for video coaching of FSD & Optimus.”
In Tesla’s This fall 2024 shareholder deck, the corporate shared updates on Cortex, however nothing on Dojo. It’s not clear if Tesla’s shutdown of Dojo impacts Cortex.
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The response to Dojo’s disbanding has been combined. Some see it as one other instance of Musk making guarantees he can’t ship on that comes at a time of falling EV gross sales and a lackluster robotaxi rollout. Others say the shutdown wasn’t a failure, however a strategic pivot from a high-risk, self-reliant {hardware} to a streamlined path that depends on companions for chip growth.
Dojo’s story reveals what was on the road, the place the challenge fell brief, and what its shutdown indicators for Tesla’s future.
A recap of Dojo’s shutdown
Tesla disbanded its Dojo staff and shut down the challenge in mid-August 2025. Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, left the corporate as effectively, following the departure of round 20 employees who left to begin their very own AI chip and infrastructure firm known as DensityAI.
Analysts have identified that shedding key expertise can rapidly derail a challenge, particularly a extremely specialised, inside tech challenge.
The shutdown got here a few weeks after Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal to get its next-generation AI6 chips from Samsung. The AI6 chip is Tesla’s wager on a chip design that may scale from powering FSD and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots to high-performance AI coaching in information facilities.
“As soon as it turned clear that each one paths converged to AI6, I needed to shut down Dojo and make some powerful personnel decisions, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary useless finish,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns. “Dojo 3 arguably lives on within the type of numerous AI6 [systems-on-a-chip] on a single board.”
Tesla’s Dojo backstory
Musk has insisted that Tesla isn’t simply an automaker, or perhaps a purveyor of photo voltaic panels and vitality storage methods. As an alternative, he has pitched Tesla as an AI firm, one which has cracked the code to self-driving vehicles by mimicking human notion.
Most different corporations constructing autonomous automobile know-how depend on a mix of sensors to understand the world — like lidar, radar and cameras — in addition to high-definition maps to localize the automobile. Tesla believes it might obtain totally autonomous driving by counting on cameras alone to seize visible information after which use superior neural networks to course of that information and make fast selections about how the automobile ought to behave.
The pitch has been that Dojo-trained AI software program will ultimately be pushed out to Tesla clients through over-the-air updates. The size of FSD additionally means Tesla has been capable of rake in tens of millions of miles value of video footage that it makes use of to coach FSD. The concept there’s that the extra information Tesla can gather, the nearer the automaker can get to truly reaching full self-driving.
Nonetheless, some trade consultants say there is perhaps a restrict to the brute drive method of throwing extra information at a mannequin and anticipating it to get smarter.
“Initially, there’s an financial constraint, and shortly it can simply get too costly to try this,” Anand Raghunathan, Purdue College’s Silicon Valley professor {of electrical} and laptop engineering, instructed TechCrunch. Additional, he mentioned, “Some individuals declare that we would truly run out of significant information to coach the fashions on. Extra information doesn’t essentially imply extra data, so it is dependent upon whether or not that information has data that’s helpful to create a greater mannequin, and if the coaching course of is ready to truly distill that data into a greater mannequin.”
Raghunathan mentioned regardless of these doubts, the pattern of extra information seems to be right here for the short-term a minimum of. And extra information means extra compute energy wanted to retailer and course of all of it to coach Tesla’s AI fashions. That was the place Dojo, the supercomputer, got here in.
What’s a supercomputer?
Dojo was Tesla’s supercomputer system that was designed to perform as a coaching floor for AI, particularly FSD. The title is a nod to the house the place martial arts are practiced.
A supercomputer is made up of hundreds of smaller computer systems known as nodes. Every of these nodes has its personal CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit). The previous handles total administration of the node, and the latter does the complicated stuff, like splitting duties into a number of elements and dealing on them concurrently.
GPUs are important for machine studying operations like those who energy FSD coaching in simulation. In addition they energy giant language fashions, which is why the rise of generative AI has made Nvidia probably the most priceless firm on the planet.
Even Tesla buys Nvidia GPUs to coach its AI (extra on that later).
Why did Tesla want a supercomputer?
Tesla’s vision-only method was the primary cause Tesla wanted a supercomputer. The neural networks behind FSD are educated on huge quantities of driving information to acknowledge and classify objects across the automobile after which make driving selections. That implies that when FSD is engaged, the neural nets have to gather and course of visible information repeatedly at speeds that match the depth and velocity recognition capabilities of a human.
In different phrases, Tesla means to create a digital duplicate of the human visible cortex and mind perform.
To get there, Tesla must retailer and course of all of the video information collected from its vehicles around the globe and run tens of millions of simulations to coach its mannequin on the info.
Tesla relied primarily on Nvidia to energy its present Dojo coaching laptop, however it didn’t need to have all its eggs in a single basket — not least as a result of Nvidia chips are costly. Tesla had hoped to make one thing higher that elevated bandwidth and decreased latencies. That’s why the automaker’s AI division determined to give you its personal {custom} {hardware} program that aimed to coach AI fashions extra effectively than conventional methods.
At that program’s core was Tesla’s proprietary D1 chips, which the corporate mentioned had been optimized for AI workloads.
Inform me extra about these chips
Tesla, like Apple, believes {hardware} and software program ought to be designed to work collectively. That’s why Tesla was working to maneuver away from the usual GPU {hardware} and design its personal chips to energy Dojo.
Tesla unveiled its D1 chip, a silicon sq. the scale of a palm, on AI Day in 2021. The D1 chip entered into manufacturing round July 2023.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm (TSMC) manufactured the chips utilizing 7 nanometer semiconductor nodes. The D1 has 50 billion transistors and a big die measurement of 645 millimeters squared, in keeping with Tesla. That is all to say that the D1 guarantees to be extraordinarily highly effective and environment friendly and to deal with complicated duties rapidly.
The D1 wasn’t as highly effective as Nvidia’s A100 chip, although.
Tesla had been engaged on a next-gen D2 chip that aimed to resolve data move bottlenecks. As an alternative of connecting the person chips, the D2 would have put your entire Dojo tile onto a single wafer of silicon.
Tesla by no means confirmed what number of D1 chips it ordered or obtained. The corporate additionally by no means offered a timeline for the way lengthy it might have taken to get Dojo supercomputers working on D1 chips.
What did Dojo imply for Tesla?
Tesla’s hope was that by taking management of its personal chip manufacturing, it’d someday have the ability to rapidly add giant quantities of compute energy to AI coaching applications at a low price.
It additionally meant not having to depend on Nvidia’s chips sooner or later, that are more and more costly and laborious to safe. Now, Tesla goes all-in on partnerships – with Nvidia, AMD, and Samsung, which is able to construct its next-gen AI6 chip.
Throughout Tesla’s second-quarter 2024 earnings name, Musk mentioned demand for Nvidia {hardware} was “so excessive that it’s typically troublesome to get the GPUs.” He mentioned he was “fairly involved about truly with the ability to get regular GPUs after we need them, and I feel this subsequently requires that we put much more effort on Dojo so as to make sure that we’ve received the coaching functionality that we’d like.”
Dojo was a dangerous wager, one which Musk hedged a number of instances by saying that Tesla may not succeed.
In the long term, Tesla toyed with the thought of making a brand new enterprise mannequin primarily based on its AI division, with Musk even saying throughout a Q2 2024 earnings name that he noticed “a path to being aggressive with Nvidia with Dojo.” Whereas D1 was extra tailor-made for Tesla laptop imaginative and prescient labeling and coaching – helpful for FSD and Optimus coaching – it wouldn’t have been helpful for a lot else. Future variations must be extra tailor-made to general-purpose AI coaching, mentioned Musk.
The issue that Tesla might need come up towards is that the majority AI software program out there was written to work with GPUs. Utilizing Dojo chips to coach general-purpose AI fashions would have required rewriting the software program.
That’s, until Tesla rented out its compute, just like how AWS and Azure lease out cloud computing capabilities – an concept that excited analysts. A September 2023 report from Morgan Stanley predicted that Dojo might add $500 billion to Tesla’s market worth by unlocking new income streams within the type of robotaxis and software program providers.
In brief, Dojo chips had been an insurance coverage coverage for the automaker, however one which may have paid dividends.
How far did Tesla Dojo get?
Musk typically offered progress stories, however a lot of his targets for Dojo had been by no means reached.
As an example, Musk recommended in June 2023 that Dojo had been on-line and working helpful duties for a couple of months.” Across the similar time, Tesla mentioned it anticipated Dojo to be one of many high 5 strongest supercomputers by February 2024 and had deliberate for complete compute to succeed in 100 exaflops in October 2024, which might have required roughly 276,000 D1s, or round 320,500 Nvidia A100 GPUs.
Tesla by no means offered an replace or any data that might recommend it ever reached these targets.
Tesla and Musk made quite a few different pledges for Dojo, together with monetary ones. As an example, Tesla dedicated in January 2024 to spend $500 million to construct a Dojo supercomputer at its gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, and has already spent $314 million of that, per a 2024 report.
Simply after Tesla’s second-quarter 2024 earnings name, Musk posted images of Dojo 1 on X, saying that it might have “roughly 8k H100-equivalent of coaching on-line by finish of yr. Not huge, however not trivial both.”
Regardless of all of this exercise — significantly by Musk on X and in earnings calls — point out of Dojo abruptly ended August 2024. And discuss switched to Cortex.
Through the firm’s fourth-quarter 2024 earnings name, Tesla mentioned it accomplished the deployment of Cortex, “a ~50k H100 coaching cluster at Gigafactory Texas” and that Cortex helped allow V13 of supervised FSD.
In Q2 2025, Tesla famous it “expanded AI coaching compute with a further 16k H200 GPUs at Gigafactory Texas, bringing Cortex to a complete of 67k H100 equivalents.” Throughout that very same earnings name, Musk mentioned he anticipated to have a second Dojo cluster working “at scale” in 2026. He additionally hinted at potential redundancies.
“Interested by Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it looks like intuitively, we need to attempt to discover convergence there, the place it’s principally the identical chip,” Musk mentioned.
A couple of weeks later, he reversed course and disbanded the Dojo staff.
TechCrunch confirmed in late August 2025 that Tesla nonetheless plans to commit $500 million to a supercomputer in Buffalo – it simply gained’t be Dojo.
This story initially revealed August 3, 2024. The article was up to date for a last time September 2, 2025 with new details about Tesla’s choice to close down Dojo.
