Tesla will streamline its AI chip analysis to give attention to its growth of inference chips used to run AI fashions and make real-time selections, CEO Elon Musk mentioned, after a media report he had ordered the closure of the in-house Dojo supercomputer staff.
Bloomberg Information on Thursday cited individuals accustomed to the matter as saying Musk had ordered the Dojo staff to be disbanded, with staff chief Peter Bannon departing the corporate.
Tesla didn’t reply to a Reuters request for remark.
The Dojo supercomputer was designed round customized coaching chips to course of huge quantities of knowledge and video from Tesla EVs to coach the automaker’s autonomous-driving software program.
“It does not make sense for Tesla to divide its assets and scale two fairly completely different AI chip designs,” Musk mentioned in an X put up late on Thursday.
“The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips shall be glorious for inference and at the very least fairly good for coaching. All effort is targeted on that,” he mentioned, with out immediately mentioning Dojo.
Morgan Stanley analysts led by Adam Jonas valued the Dojo supercomputer at $500 billion in 2023, saying it opened a brand new marketplace for the automaker past vehicles gross sales, much like how Amazon’s cloud unit boosts revenue for the ecommerce agency.
“Dojo is the important thing accelerant on the intersection of {hardware} and software program,” the brokerage mentioned on August 4. Jonas didn’t instantly reply to a question if the newest growth would harm Tesla’s valuation.
Tech firms are more and more designing customized chips to chop latency, energy and price, whereas consolidating round fewer architectures.
Tesla has been restructuring over the previous yr, with its share worth slumping as gross sales of its EVs have been hit by rising competitors and a backlash by European customers particularly in opposition to Musk’s political beliefs.
The corporate has seen a number of government departures and lower hundreds of jobs, and redirected its focus to AI-driven self-driving expertise and robotics, with Musk pursuing an integration technique throughout his tech enterprise empire.
Musk has mentioned next-generation AI5 chips could be produced on the finish of 2026 and final month introduced a $16.5 billion deal to supply AI6 chips from Samsung Electronics, with out offering a manufacturing timeline.
He has mentioned future AI inference chips, together with AI6, could be deployed in self-driving automobiles and its Optimus humanoid robots, although he has famous the substantial computing energy might allow broader AI functions.
The Dojo staff not too long ago misplaced about 20 staff to newly-formed DensityAI, and the remaining staff are being reassigned to different knowledge heart and compute initiatives inside Tesla, the Bloomberg report mentioned.
