Tesla shuts down Dojo, the AI training supercomputer that Musk said would be key to full self-driving
Tesla is breaking up the team behind its Dojo supercomputer, ending the automaker’s play at developing in-house chips for driverless technology, according to Bloomberg.
Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, is leaving the company, and the remaining team members will be reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, per Bloomberg’s reporting, which cited anonymous sources.
The disbanding of Tesla’s Dojo efforts follows the departure of around 20 workers, who left the automaker to start their own AI company called DensityAI. The new startup is reportedly coming out of stealth soon and is building chips, hardware, and software that will power data centers for AI that are used in robotics, by AI agents, and in automotive applications. DensityAI was founded by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering.
CEO Elon Musk has pushed to get shareholders to view Tesla as an AI and robotics company, despite a limited robotaxi launch in Austin this past June that featured Model Y vehicles with a human in the front passenger seat and resulted in a number of reported incidents of the vehicles exhibiting problematic driving behavior.
