Tesla shuts down Dojo supercomputer team and shifts focus to AI chips

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has ordered to shut down its Dojo supercomputer team, with team leader Peter Bannon departing the company, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Dojo supercomputer was designed around custom training chips to process vast amounts of data and video from Tesla EVs to train the automaker's autonomous-driving software.

Tesla did not reply to a Reuters request for comment. CEO Elon Musk said on X that it didn't make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two different AI chips.

Over the past year, Tesla, amid a company-wide restructuring, has seen multiple executive departures and thousands of job cuts. The company has redirected its focus to AI-driven self-driving technology and robotics, with CEO Elon Musk pursuing an integration strategy across his business empire.

In March, xAI acquired the social media platform X for $33 billion to bolster its chatbot training capabilities, while Tesla integrated the Grok chatbot into its vehicles.

The automaker also plans to increase its reliance on external technology partners such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for compute, and Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing, as per the Bloomberg report.

Last month, Samsung secured a $16.5 billion deal to supply AI chips to Tesla, expected to power self-driving cars, humanoid robots and data centers.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk earlier said that Samsung's new chip factory in Taylor, Texas would make Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip.

While no timeline was provided for AI6 chip production, Musk has previously said that next-generation AI5 chips will be produced at the end of 2026, suggesting AI6 would follow.

"The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that", Musk said in an X post late Thursday.

Musk also said that in a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips. "One could call that Dojo 3, I suppose", he said.

The Dojo team recently lost about 20 workers to newly formed DensityAI, and the remaining workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the Bloomberg report said.

Nvidia declined to comment on the Bloomberg report, while AMD and Samsung did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.