Tesla Dismantles Dojo Supercomputer and Goes All-In on AI6 Chips - Elon Musk's Breakthrough

Tesla is disbanding the Dojo team, and project leader Peter Bannon is leaving the company. The Dojo supercomputer team recently lost about 20 employees to the startup DensityAI, founded by Dojo's former head. Bloomberg and other outlets have reported that Tesla is dismantling its internal Dojo project, which focused on building AI-optimized silicon for the automaker's self-driving technology.

Elon Musk confirmed the shift in chip strategy: "It makes no sense for Tesla to split its resources across two such different AI chip architectures," he wrote on X. "Tesla's AI5, AI6, and later chips will be excellent for inference and at least good enough for training self-driving vehicles. All efforts are focused on this."

Tesla and Samsung team up on AI chips

Wells Fargo said the move "could be seen as a significant shift" from Musk's previous emphasis on in-house AI hardware, given the continued performance improvements of Nvidia's GPUs. In late July, Tesla signed a $16 billion deal with Samsung for AI chips, and Musk said at the time that Samsung's new factory in Texas would be "dedicated to producing Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip," with the goal of using the new memory chips for the Optimus humanoid robot, fully self-driving vehicles, and AI data centers. Tesla's plans appear to call for the AI5 and AI6 chips to power the company's upcoming self-driving systems, known as Hardware 5 and Hardware 6, or HW5 and HW6.