Elon Musk declares Dojo 2 is “now an evolutionary dead end.” PATRICK PLEUL/POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Tesla has officially ended its Dojo supercomputer project, closing out a four-year effort to develop one of the world’s most powerful A.I. training systems and marking a major shift in Tesla’s A.I. ambitions. CEO Elon Musk announced the shutdown in a series of posts on X over the weekend. He also confirmed that the entire Dojo team of about 20 employees has been disbanded.
Dojo is powered by Tesla’s D1 chip, designed in-house (and manufactured by TSMC) to handle massive volumes of driving data for training the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) system. With Dojo shelved, Tesla is pivoting to a streamlined chip strategy, focusing on next-generation chips like AI5 (manufactured by TSMC) and AI6 (manufactured by Samsung) for both training and deployment. AI5 chip is built to power self-driving and robotics capabilities, while AI6 can additionally handle large-scale A.I. training tasks.
“Once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary dead end,” Musk explained on X.
First unveiled at Tesla’s AI Day in 2021, Dojo was pitched as a breakthrough that would reduce reliance on third-party chip suppliers such as Nvidia, while delivering greater bandwidth, lower latency and lower costs.
The decision follows months of internal turbulence in the Dojo division, including the loss of several key engineers. Musk noted that it no longer made sense for Tesla to divide its resources between two different A.I. chip product lines—one optimized for inference and another for training. Inference refers to the process of running an already-trained A.I. model to make real-time decisions, such as identifying objects on the road in a moving car. Training, by contrast, is the computationally intensive process of teaching an A.I. model by feeding it massive amounts of data until it can recognize patterns accurately.
“In a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips on a board, whether for inference or training, simply to reduce network cabling complexity and cost by a few orders of magnitude,” Musk wrote on X.
The shutdown also comes as Tesla faces mounting challenges in its core electric vehicle business. In the latest quarter ended June 30, Tesla’s EV revenue dropped 16 percent from the previous year, while total revenue fell 12 percent year-over-year. The company’s U.S. market share has also slid sharply, falling to less than 50 percent from 75 percent in 2022.
