Tesla is breaking apart the crew behind its Dojo supercomputer, ending the automaker’s play at creating in-house chips for driverless expertise, in keeping with Bloomberg.
Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving the corporate, and the remaining crew members will likely be reassigned to different information middle and compute tasks inside Tesla, per Bloomberg’s reporting which cited nameless sources.
The disbanding of Tesla’s Dojo efforts follows the departure of round 20 employees, who left the automaker to start out their very own AI company called DensityAI. The brand new startup is reportedly popping out of stealth quickly and is constructing chips, {hardware}, and software program that can energy information facilities for AI which can be utilized in robotics, by AI brokers, and in automotive purposes. DensityAI was based by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla workers Invoice Chang and Ben Floering.
It additionally comes at a vital time for Tesla.
CEO Elon Musk has pushed to get shareholders to view Tesla as an AI and robotics firm, regardless of a restricted robotaxi launch in Austin this previous June that featured Mannequin Y automobiles with a human within the entrance passenger seat and resulted in various reported incidents of the automobiles exhibiting problematic driving conduct.
Tesla’s determination to close down Dojo, which Musk has been speaking about since 2019, is a serious shift in technique. CEO Elon Musk has mentioned that Dojo could be the cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions and its objective to succeed in full self-driving attributable to its means to “course of actually huge quantities of video information.” He talked about Dojo, albeit briefly, as not too long ago as the corporate’s second-quarter earnings name.
In 2023, Morgan Stanley predicted Dojo may add $500 billion to the corporate’s market worth by unlocking new income streams within the type of robotaxis and software program companies. Simply final yr, Musk famous that Tesla’s AI crew would “double down” on Dojo within the lead-up to Tesla’s robotaxi reveal, which occurred in October.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
However discuss Dojo halted round August 2024, when Musk started touting Cortex as an alternative, Tesla’s “large new AI coaching supercluster being constructed at Tesla HQ in Austin to unravel real-world AI.”
The Dojo undertaking was one half supercomputer, one half in-house chip-making. Tesla unveiled its D1 chip when it formally introduced Dojo at its first AI Day in 2021. Venkataramanan introduced the chip, which Tesla mentioned could be used alongside Nvidia’s GPU to energy the Dojo supercomputer. The automaker additionally mentioned it was engaged on a next-gen D2 chip that will remedy any data move bottlenecks of its predecessor.
Sources informed Bloomberg that now Tesla plans to extend its reliance on Nvidia, in addition to different exterior tech companions like AMD for compute and Samsung for chip manufacturing. Tesla final month signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to make its AI6 inference chips, a chip design that guarantees to scale from powering FSD and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots all the way in which to high-performance AI coaching in information facilities.
Throughout Tesla’s second-quarter earnings name, Musk hinted at potential redundancies.
“Fascinated with Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it looks as if intuitively, we need to attempt to discover convergence there, the place it’s principally the identical chip,” Musk mentioned.
The information comes as Tesla’s board offers Musk a $29 billion pay package to maintain him at Tesla and assist push the corporate’s AI efforts ahead, somewhat than getting too sidetracked by his different corporations, together with the extra pure-play AI startup xAI.
TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla for extra data.
Have a delicate tip or confidential paperwork? We’re reporting on the inside workings of the AI business — from the businesses shaping its future to the folks impacted by their selections. Attain out to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com and Maxwell Zeff at maxwell.zeff@techcrunch.com. For safe communication, you’ll be able to contact us by way of Sign at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.