“Doesn’t Make Sense”: Tesla Winds Down Dojo Supercomputer Effort 

Elon Musk responded on X to a Bloomberg story about Tesla shutting down its in-house Dojo supercomputer program and reassigning remaining staff to other compute projects, following the departure of Dojo head Peter Bannon and an exodus of nearly two dozen employees to a new stealth startup called DensityAI.

“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,” Musk wrote on X late Thursday night, responding to a user about the Bloomberg story that cited multiple sources. 

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

Musk continued, “In a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips on a board, whether for inference or training, simply to reduce network cabling complexity & cost by a few orders of magnitude. One could call that Dojo 3, I suppose.”

“Elon Musk @elonmusk · 6h The difference in real-world performance between AI4 and AI5 is far more than any chip version I’ve ever heard of by a lot. It’s real good,” he added. 

The difference in real-world performance between AI4 and AI5 is far more than any chip version I’ve ever heard of by a lot.

It’s real good.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 8, 2025

The decision to wind down Dojo marks a strategic shift from developing in-house supercomputers for driverless-vehicle technology to increasing reliance on Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing. 

Dojo was once positioned to be the center of processing video data from Tesla vehicles to improve Autopilot, Full Self-Driving, and the Optimus robot. It was seen as a potential $500 billion market value driver. But recent talent losses, EV price wars, sliding sales, and political backlash against Musk by unhinged Democrats and their dark-money funded NGO networks pressured the company. 

Musk had previously described Dojo as a “long shot”… 

Bloomberg described DensityAI as “poised to come out of stealth soon” and is developing AI chips and systems for data centers, robotics, AI agents, and automotive applications. Former Dojo heads founded the startup. 

In late July, Musk announced that Tesla’s AI6 chip will be manufactured at Samsung’s new, massive chip fabrication plant in Texas, strategically located near Tesla’s Model Y and Cybertruck production facilities. 

“Samsung’s giant new Texas fab will be dedicated to making Tesla’s next-generation AI6 chip. The strategic importance of this is hard to overstate,” Elon Musk wrote on X last month. 

Samsung agreed to allow Tesla to assist in maximizing manufacturing efficiency.

This is a critical point, as I will walk the line personally to accelerate the pace of progress. And the fab is conveniently located not far from my house

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2025

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