Elon Musk confirms shutdown of Tesla Dojo

Elon Musk has confirmed the shutdown of Tesla’s Dojo AI training supercomputer project, calling it an “evolutionary dead end.” The announcement comes just weeks after Musk had stated he expected Tesla’s second Dojo cluster to be operating at scale by 2026. In a post on X, the social media platform Musk owns, he explained that once it became clear all development paths pointed toward the company’s newer AI6 chips, the Dojo initiative had to be discontinued. “Once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary dead end,” Musk wrote on Sunday. The original Dojo supercomputer, unveiled in 2019, was powered by a combination of Nvidia GPUs and Tesla’s in-house D1 chips. The company had planned to expand with Dojo 2, which would have relied on a next-generation D2 chip. However, that chip has now been scrapped, along with the broader Dojo architecture. Tesla is now fully pivoting toward its AI5 and AI6 chips—manufactured by TSMC and Samsung, respectively. The AI5 chip is primarily designed to support Full Self-Driving (FSD) capabilities in Tesla vehicles, while the AI6 chip is intended for both on-device inference and large-scale AI training. Musk emphasized that maintaining two separate chip architectures would be inefficient. “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs,” he said. Instead, Tesla will focus on deploying large numbers of AI5 and AI6 chips on single boards, which Musk noted would drastically reduce network cabling complexity and cost—by “a few orders of magnitude.” He suggested that this new approach could be considered “Dojo 3,” even if it’s not formally branded as such. The shift follows a broader strategic pivot at Tesla. In August 2024, Musk began promoting Cortex, a new AI training supercluster being built at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin. Details about Cortex remain sparse, and it’s unclear whether the project is still moving forward. TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla for clarification on the status of both Cortex and the Dojo facility in Buffalo, New York, which was reportedly funded with $500 million. This strategic change comes amid a challenging period for Tesla. The company has seen declining electric vehicle sales and reputational damage following Musk’s increasing involvement in politics. Despite these setbacks, Musk continues to push the narrative that Tesla remains a leader in AI and autonomy, even as its robotaxi rollout in Austin has been marred by safety concerns and erratic driving behavior. The cancellation of Dojo marks a significant departure from Musk’s long-held vision of building a proprietary, in-house AI infrastructure to power self-driving cars and humanoid robots. With the focus now on scalable, off-the-shelf chip integration, Tesla’s AI ambitions are taking a more pragmatic, hardware-agnostic path.