Tesla dismantles Dojo supercomputer team in AI shakeup – report

Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) is dismantling its Dojo supercomputer team, and the group’s leader is set to leave the company, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Peter Bannon, who led the Dojo project, is leaving the company, while remaining team members will be reassigned to other data centers and compute initiatives within Tesla, according to the report. The disbanding follows the recent departure of around 20 Tesla employees who left to form a new AI startup, DensityAI.

The move marks a setback in Tesla’s push to build in-house chips for autonomous driving.

Responding to a user’s post about the report, CEO Elon Musk said on X, “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs.” He added that all efforts will now be focused on Tesla’s upcoming AI5, AI6, and future chip architectures.

The decision to wind down Dojo marks a reversal for a project Musk has championed since 2019, calling it a key pillar of Tesla’s AI vision. He had touted Dojo’s ability to “process truly vast amounts of video data” as essential to achieving full self-driving capabilities. Musk referenced Dojo, albeit briefly, during Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, where he also hinted at internal redundancies.

According to Bloomberg, Tesla now plans to deepen its reliance on external partners like Nvidia (NVDA) and AMD (AMD) for compute power, and Samsung (OTCPK:SSNLF) for chip manufacturing. Last month, Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce its upcoming AI6 inference chips, which are designed to scale across Tesla’s FSD platform, the Optimus humanoid robot, and high-performance AI data center workloads.