Elon Musk confirmed over the weekend reviews that Tesla has disbanded the group engaged on its Dojo AI coaching supercomputer, simply weeks after announcing 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 powerful personnel decisions, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary useless finish,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Sunday. “Dojo 3 arguably lives on within the type of a lot of 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 below improvement 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 will probably be wonderful for inference and at the least 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 scale back community cabling complexity & price by just a few orders of magnitude.”
“One may name that Dojo 3, I suppose,” he stated.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
Musk has talked about Dojo since 2019, reiterating that Dojo could be a cornerstone of Tesla’s mission to attain 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 continues to be within the works. TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla to study extra, in addition to to inquire concerning 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 injury 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 automobiles exhibiting problematic driving habits.