Elon Musk confirms shutdown of Tesla Dojo, ‘an evolutionary dead end’ 

Elon Musk confirmed over the weekend studies that Tesla has disbanded the staff engaged on its Dojo AI coaching supercomputer, simply weeks after asserting he anticipated to have Tesla’s second cluster working “at scale” in 2026. 

“As soon as it turned clear that each one paths converged to AI6, I needed to shut down Dojo and make some robust personnel selections, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary lifeless finish,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Sunday. “Dojo 3 arguably lives on within the type of numerous AI6 [systems-on-a-chip] on a single board.”

After bringing its first Dojo supercomputer to life and powering it with a mixture of Nvidia GPUs and in-house-made D1 chips, Tesla had deliberate to construct a second Dojo manufacturing facility — referred to by Musk as “Dojo 2” — that will have been powered by a second-generation D2 chip. 

It seems the D2 chip underneath growth has been shelved together with the broader Dojo mission as Tesla shifts its focus to its AI5 and AI6 chips, that are being manufactured by TSMC and Samsung, respectively. The AI5 chip is primarily constructed to energy FSD, Tesla’s driver help system, whereas AI6 is designed for each onboard inference — which means, it guarantees to energy self-driving in automobiles and autonomous capabilities in humanoid robots — and large-scale AI coaching.  

“It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its assets and scale two fairly totally different AI chip designs,” Musk posted late Friday night. “The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips shall be glorious for inference and no less than fairly good for coaching. All effort is targeted on that.”

He added that for a supercomputer cluster, it makes extra sense to place “many AI5/AI6 chips on a board, whether or not for inference or coaching, merely to cut back community cabling complexity & value by a couple of orders of magnitude.” 

“One might name that Dojo 3, I suppose,” he stated.

Musk has talked about Dojo since 2019, reiterating that Dojo can be a cornerstone of Tesla’s mission to realize full self-driving and commercialize humanoid robots. Speak of Dojo halted round August 2024 when Musk started touting Cortex as a substitute, a “big new AI coaching supercluster being constructed at Tesla HQ in Austin to resolve real-world AI.”

It’s not clear if Cortex remains to be within the works. Trendster has reached out to Tesla to study extra, in addition to to inquire in regards to the destiny of the Dojo facility Tesla had invested $500 million to construct in Buffalo, New York. 

The shift in technique comes at a time when Tesla is experiencing falling EV gross sales and important model harm after Musk’s forays into politics. Musk has labored to persuade traders that Tesla nonetheless has a future in autonomy, regardless of a sluggish and restricted robotaxi launch in Austin this previous June that resulted in quite a few reported incidents of the autos exhibiting problematic driving conduct. 

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