Elon Musk has confirmed Tesla is shutting down the team behind its Dojo AI training supercomputer, marking a major shift in the company’s AI strategy. The move comes just weeks after Musk said he expected Tesla’s second Dojo cluster to be operating “at scale” by 2026.
“Once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices,” Musk posted on X. He added that “Dojo 3” will effectively live on as boards packed with Tesla’s new AI6 systems-on-a-chip.
Tesla had originally built Dojo using Nvidia GPUs and in-house D1 chips, with plans for “Dojo 2” powered by a D2 chip. But that chip has been shelved, along with the broader project, as Tesla pivots to AI5 and AI6 designs,manufactured by TSMC and Samsung, for both Full Self-Driving (FSD) and broader AI training.
Musk said focusing on a single chip architecture will cut complexity and costs for Tesla’s AI clusters, avoiding the need to scale two different designs. The change comes as Tesla faces slowing EV sales, reputational challenges, and a rocky robotaxi rollout in Austin earlier this year.
The fate of the $500 million Dojo facility in Buffalo, New York remains unclear, as does the status of “Cortex,” another Musk-touted AI supercluster project.
