Updated:Elon Musk later responded on "X" that he believed it was meaningless for Tesla to disperse its resources across different chip designs, emphasizing that Tesla is currently focusing its main efforts on AI5 and AI6 chips, which are expected to be used in the Optimus humanoid robot and Cybercab driverless taxi, rather than just for artificial intelligence training. Therefore, he believes that Dojo should exit.
It doesn't make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs.
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.
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 8, 2025
Bloomberg NewsCiting sources familiar with the matter, Tesla is disbanding the internal team responsible for developing the Dojo supercomputer and transferring relevant team members to other data centers and computing-related projects. This decision not only marks the end of Tesla's investment in its own AI chip development, but also highlights a major shift in its AI development strategy.
Reports indicate that Peter Bannon, a key figure in the Dojo project and head of the department, is about to leave. This project, proposed by Elon Musk in 2019, featured the self-developed D2021 chip unveiled at AI Day 1 and is considered a key foundation for fully autonomous driving (FSD).
Tesla has experienced internal personnel turmoil in recent years, with approximately 20 team members leaving. Former head Ganesh Venkataramanan even founded a new startup, DensityAI, after leaving. This company continues Dojo's technology line and focuses on developing the chips, software and hardware required for AI data centers, with applications covering robotics, AI agents, and the automotive industry.
Since August 2024, the discussion volume of Dojo has dropped sharply, and Elon Musl has shifted the focus to the giant AI training cluster "Cortex" located at the Austin headquarters, aiming to solve real-world AI problems, which has led to speculation from the outside world whether Dojo is about to exit.
With the current rumors that Dojo will be terminated, Tesla's AI hardware strategy may shift to alliances with external technology giants. Among them, Tesla plans to deepen its cooperation with NVIDIA and cooperate with AMD inComputing field, and SamsungWafer manufacturingBuild closer relationships.
Tesla and SamsungSigned $165 billion in contracts, commissioned it to produce the next-generation AI6 chip. This highly scalable chip will be used in the FSD autonomous driving system, Optimus humanoid robots, and data center AI training.
During the second-quarter earnings call, Elon Musk mentioned his hope to find common ground between the Dojo 3 and AI6 chips to create a universal chip with both inference and training capabilities, thereby integrating R&D resources. Therefore, external collaboration may be an effective way to achieve this goal.
