Tesla is dissolving the team that was developing its Dojo supercomputer, according to Bloomberg. The change, which reportedly includes the departure of Dojo head Peter Bannon, marks a notable shift away from using in-house technology to train the AI models powering Tesla’s self-driving features and its Optimus humanoid robot.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk first introduced Dojo in 2019, which he described as a “super powerful training computer” capable of processing heaps of vehicle video data that it uses to train AI chips. Bloomberg says Tesla now plans to partner with Nvidia and AMD for compute, while turning to Samsung for chip manufacturing.
Last month, Musk announced that Tesla struck a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to develop the automaker’s next-generation AI6 chip. In response to Bloomberg’s reporting, Musk wrote on X that 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.”
The team’s disbandment comes at a pivotal time for Tesla, which has just rolled out its robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, with a safety monitor in the passenger seat. Its subsequent launch in San Francisco puts a human at the wheel, a move that contradicts Musk’s promise of having “no one in the car.”
Tesla’s Dojo team already took a big hit earlier this month, when Bloomberg reported that around 20 members left the company to start DensityAI, a startup “focused on data center services for industries from automotive to robotics.” The automaker shifted its remaining Dojo employees to other areas of the company, according to Bloomberg.
