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By "personnel", I assume he means firing people he really didn't want to.
Okay can someone explain the layman what on earth he’s talking about here?
I wonder what'll happen with the hardware used in these projects. Hopefully we see it dumped on the market like other enterprise hardware 🙂 I can think of a few fun projects.
I think I read like 2 days ago that there was a rumour Dojo was dead but Tesla wouldn't admit to it (yet). So it seems like the rumour has been confirmed.
Tesla was making their own chips for a super computer known as dojo to train ai models. They thought they could do it better and not rely on outside suppliers. They’ve given up on that and are instead going to use chips made by Samsung for both training and inference. Because of this switch they fired a bunch of the chip making talent in they had brought in for dojo.
There was no point for Tesla to design two different chip architectures, one for Dojo training computers and one for FSD/Optimus real-world inference, if they both fundamentally do the same thing. On the most fundamental level both chips run matrix calculations, and if one design can do both you gain better economies of scale and resource allocation. Also consider that when a Tesla isn’t driving while charging, its idle FSD computer can be used for distributed cloud computing, which works best if it’s the same chips located in dedicated server farms.
Translation: Elon blew a bunch of Tesla’s money on a failed AI project. Sort of like the money he blew on Cybertruck, Model 2 R&D, that stupid diner…
Is Dojo same like Grok?
Maybe a nitpick but; to be clear the AI5 and AI6 chips are designed in house by Tesla. It is just that they will be *produced* by Samsung as Tesla doesn't need or have their own foundry. Kinda like AMD is designing the chips, and TSMC is actually producing them.
Tbf, Amazon put a lot of money into their custom silicone and have 2 separate chips. I’m sure they share a lot of the same technology, under the hood, but it does seem for them, at least at that point in development, it seemed appropriate to have separate chip designs for each function. https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/trainium/ https://aws.amazon.com/ai/machine-learning/inferentia/
Doesn't surprise me. There so much demand for training right now. Money isn't the barrier, it's getting the fastest hardware right now. NVIDA and AMD have off the shelf solutions. As for inference, as Elon says A16 does that. It just needs repackaging into a solution for datacenters. Also, it occurred to me qroq (with a q) have an inference chip, being made out of the same Samsung Texas fab. Just saying.
That’s one fancy homelab! ;)
Mag 7 do this all the time. They all have billions wasted in dead projects that didn't go anywhere
Basically use another hype to cover up the failure of previous hype
It was proprietary and never really took off. They'll probably destroy it.
I’m sorry but what use cases are possible with idle FSD computers in cars connected via LTE or home broadband connections? On top of this the car has to be plugged in or else the battery will drain. And you have to compensate the owners for contributing compute. So what use case would make any economic sense under that model?
Sure but they also have SaaS making them billions each month whereas Tesla has to sell a car currently. Mag7 can afford these dead ends, harder for Tesla to absorb
They also don’t start up competing companies at the same time though. Also none of the other mag 7 have had a bomb like the cyber truck. You don’t have to be Steve jobs to know that thing was a terrible idea from the jump
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Right, or like Apple that does the same - designs by themselves and outsources the manufacturing.
People keep implying that as one gets new information and breakthroughs, like new AI technology that reduces the need for server specific training silicon, that it is weakness to take that information and pivot as the situation unfolds.
Dojo3’s design is being changed. What was wrong about the reporting is implying that Dojo was being cancelled… it isn’t, it is morphing.
Rumor? It was confirmed. This is just the Elon tweet. He tweeted about it a few days ago also.
Another interesting possibility if they are clever with the design, they could break down old training computers to distribute as upgrades to cars if they built them modular in the right way. Would be cool to have a way to recycle the silicon as they upgrade.
Google graveyard would like a word. Also, while cybertruck might not be doing all that well, the tech they designed for it will find its way into other products.
Honestly there has been a lot that has changed since Dojo was originally started. And it was always viewed as a long shot and more "just in case" thing given the massive supply limit to Compute there was and was forcasted to be. But I think right now they are growing more confident that the inference is the limiting factor or the more important chip to own basically.. which is why instead of having 2 more separate projects - Dojo 3 and AI6 - they are instead just going all in into AI6 essentially. And maybe it won't be quite as good for Training as the dedicated Dojo3 could have been, BUT if they need it for that as well it'll be good enough. But the benefits of AI6 as designed for inference they view as VERY large and the competition not as strong essentially. Like for the training, NVIDIA objectively is the best in the world and as long as Tesla gets priority for purchase, there really isn't the biggest need for the backup plan. They already view their AI4 as the best for inference in the car/robots on the market. And they believe their next two gen designs are large improvements on that. So imo it does make sense to do it AS LONG AS they are confident that they wont be supply constrained by NVIDIA, which imo given Musk relationship with Jensen, I don't think they are. Musk seems to be able to get his hands on as much compute as he wants from Nvidia. He absolutely gets priority given how much he buys with XAi and Tesla. I really think the ONLY major negative to this shift (and I'd bet Musk feels this way as well) isn't about the strategy or financial aspects, it's about losing the talent that don't want to stay because of it. Like Pete Bannon and his team. That the real loss in this decision imo. I mean if Dojo would have "hit" a year ago or now and been competitive with NVidia, obviously that would have been an A++ result for Tesla. But the reality is this was a longshot R&D project, and I'm sure the results are that it led to a far better AI6 design than they otherwise would have had. So net positive.
AI5 & AI6 are mobile on device AI chip. No way on earth it woyld be able to compete with NVDA or AMD AI solutions even with multiple dies on a board. The thing is Dojo was a flop. Competing against worldclass Hardcore semiconductor companies not the same as competing against Ford, GM and BYD. I am still a TSLA investor but this is bullshit.
Yes and no. Things were very different when they started the Dojo project. The tech is moving so fast. NVIDIA was not able to keep up with demand and even back then Musk said many times that Dojo was a huge risk and could fail. I don’t necessarily think they could have reached where they are now without “wasting” money of Dojo.
I’m having trouble understanding this. You just said Tesla don’t have a foundry so how were they producing their own chips before?
No
I’m lost, how are they doing the training as of today if dojo is gone? Are they just using nvidia H100s or something?
The reality is that Dojo died because the main folks behind it left to build a startup [https://electrek.co/2025/08/07/tesla-dojo-supercomputer-looks-dead-as-more-execs-leave-competing-startup/](https://electrek.co/2025/08/07/tesla-dojo-supercomputer-looks-dead-as-more-execs-leave-competing-startup/) So Elon is trying to save face by saying that Dojo (which was the supercomputer to train AI) is no longer needed because their new AI6 chip replaces the need for it. Keep in mind that on the Q2 earnings call of this year in July, Elon was still excited about Dojo, so clearly he wasn't aware that his Dojo team was leaving him and left him surprised: [https://gizmodo.com/tesla-reportedly-shuts-down-ai-project-weeks-after-musk-called-it-spectacular-2000640553](https://gizmodo.com/tesla-reportedly-shuts-down-ai-project-weeks-after-musk-called-it-spectacular-2000640553)
What vehicles have AI6?
So… did they produce dojo in-house? Unlikely!?! So who was fired then if they still have a design team? Or did they have two separate design teams? And they don’t need double talent? I‘m really struggling to understand.
Some moved to other teams within Tesla. 20 left (fired) and joined a startup called densityai doing basically the same thing as Dojo. It’s my opinion that densityai is a scam to steal VC money.
They all will 2 weeks.
Maybe. They don't seem to be itching to do that unfortunately
Like I said a few days ago (August 7th) [it was a rumour.](https://share.google/LiQftDz5hO6lsrv8b). Not sure which bit of that was confusing
Then what was that $16 billion deal with Samsung about?
I’m not providing the electricity for cloud computing unless I am compensated for it.
Yeah I’m not going to hold my breath. That stuff should be in the S and X already, but nope.
Makes my brand new HW4 juniper model y feel so dated
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I believe they were using TSMC before but they recently publicly released that they would be moving to Samsung to produce their chips.
This isn't really correct. Dojo and the AI processors were all designed by Tesla and fabricated by others. They had two lines of chips, one for training (dojo) and the other for running the neural nets in the cars (AIX). The Dojo line has been cancelled and they will use the car computer AIX line for training, at least in some capacity. Honestly though the real reason for dojo cancellation is Nvidia really can't be beat on the training front and capacity has started to catch up so they aren't constrained anymore, making this endeavor to try and have their own chip not so fruitful.
> Also none of the other mag 7 have had a bomb like the cyber truck. If CT is a bomb, what is the F150 lightning then?
Dojo was designed by Tesla, manufactured by Samsung. Edit: TSMC, not Samsung
You should always triple down on whatever you did or said 50 years ago, to save face, of course. /s
The front camera already did. Battery system will take more work.
The s and the x don't sell enough for the reengineer at the moment and the 3 and the y refreshes were too far down the pipe already.
AFAIK dojo chips were not manufactured by Samsung.
This was my understanding. I think “producing” might be confusing me - is it designing, manufacturing, or both?
They have always had NVIDIA GPU in the mix for training. Their own dedicated training chip Dojo was only a portion for their training compute. So if I understood correctly they have given up on continuing the effort of developing their own dedicated training chip and will use GPU for training with assistance from their on device inference chip (AI6).
I never buy into the google ecosystem because they discontinue *everything*
Different teams working on Dojo and the FSD hardware. The goal for the in-house FSD chips (starting with HW3, which was later retconned to AI3) were to be as efficient as possible at executing the neural nets. If the chip is too power hungry then it affects range. Dojo was a long time in the pipeline and its likely that Moore’s Law caught up with the team and the designs. From what we’ve heard before part of the plan for AI5 was to have excess compute so they could do eg. distributed inference work. Not sure if they had finished that thought in terms of owners paying excess electricity costs so that Elon could mine Doge-coin, but at this stage that’s still just a hypothetical future problem. However, at a certain point even if AI6 is way less capable than the monster of a Dojo chip they were building - producing more of something you’re already producing millions of is way cheaper than producing millions of one thing and thousands of another thing, even if you need 10x the amount of chips from the lower performing chip. Low volume chip production is ridiculously expensive per chip, especially if you want or need the latest and greatest lithography. Which you likely want because the power bill would be even bigger if you don’t. But all of this is hypothetical. And considering the long pipeline to get new FSD HW properly designed and tested/certified to go into cars (it needs to last at least the lifetime of the warranty, but ideally waaay way longer, so you need quite a few units just to be able to go through simulation of time and endurance) so you can also make them useful while doing that. That said - we don’t know how these projects were progressing, but it seems obvious that Dojo was way behind schedule. For all we know they may not even need more inference compute. Pretty sure they do, you always need more compute.
For most fab less companies (AMD, NVDA) the chip design is done by them in house which basically makes a set of blue prints or chip masks that someone such as TSMC can use to scribe all the transistors that make up the chip. So in this case, Tesla has a chip design team that designs the dojo chip or FSD chip then they find a foundry (TSMC/Samsung/Global Foundries) who can take the blue print and make the die. After the foundry makes the die, it still needs to go to an assembly house for packaging.
Just to be clear, Tesla is designing the chips for AI6, Samsung will just be producing them from their Foundry.
Honestly, it is hard to compete with the juggernaut that is Nvidia.
Yeah, sorry, TSMC.
No because it’s complete nonsense
This is false and should not be upvoted. Tesla was never going to actually make the chips. They just design the chips. In terms of the actual manufacturing of the chips, they always use fab partners like Samsung and TSMC. That hasn't changed. AI3 was manufactured by Samsung, AI4 also by Samsung, AI5 by TSMC, and AI6 will be Samsung. What changed is that previously they were designing inference chips and training chips. Now they're giving up on the dedicated training chips and planning to use the AI6 inference chips for training also.
Tesla makes $100 billion in revenue per year. They can absolutely afford this lol.
Not a rumor. Elon responded to an article confirming it was happening several days ago. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1953660184351707210
You're asking what is the use case for massive parallel compute? Seriously? Obviously they'd have to compensate people for electricity, but that's still super worthwhile. Why have millions of chips with trillions of ops/sec capability each just sitting there doing nothing for hours every day? The chips are already there. They're free. The only cost is electricity. That's a massive advantage over buying new chips.
Yup, Dojo has always been less than 10% of their total training compute.
Easy to cherry-pick the failures and ignore the massive successes. Clearly the net result is massive success, but that doesn't fit your narrative.
Tesla’s gross margin is 17-ish perfect, Microsoft’s is 68% - not even in the same league when it comes to free cash flow for fuckups
For someone so confident about this, you couldn’t share just one example use case and explain how the economics and UX works out?
It's not nonsense just because you don't understand it.
Maye Elon shouldn’t have framed Dojo as the “cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions and its goal to reach full self‑driving” when he announced it and similar hyperbole for all of his many other failures The real reason he’s cutting it is because the car division profitability is going away.
LLM inference, for example. The UX and economics would be similar to AWS.
Using in car compute is just theoretical. They will use nvda and AI5/6 for training.
Except he didn't. That's not a quote from Elon lol. But I do have a quote from Elon: > Musk described Dojo as “a long shot worth taking because the payoff is potentially very high. But it’s not something that is a high probability.” https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/21/elon-musk-buying-nvidia-hardware-even-as-tesla-aims-to-build-ai-rival.html Uh oh! Looks like your narrative just got destroyed by actual facts!
Not in the same league, but still plenty of cash. They can absolutely do big R&D.
They still make inference right? I thought they pulled the plug on training chips
August 2021 AI Day
False. Elon never said "cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions and its goal to reach full self‑driving" at AI Day 2021. Saying "its" there doesn't even make sense. He would've said "our". So clearly that quote was just written by some "journalist". It wasn't said by Elon.
He’s completely full of shit
Because meta’s mission is lame
It’s like Elon just realized a foundry of any particular value in current gen costs many many billions and is fraught with ip issues — even if he could make it work the costs for the foundry are recouped after it is well old and not sota servicing chips for other clients for years and years at low margin.
Yeah I doubt that is going to happen. HW4 FSD computer is roughly in the same league as an Apple M4 Max - it has around 16GB of GDDR6 RAM with a memory bandwidth of 224GB/s (there are 2 of them). That’s woefully low compared to the actual datacenter Nvidia GPUs used to serve LLM inference. H100 has 6x more memory and 9x more memory bandwidth. So not only would most of the latest LLMs not fit in memory, LLM inference is famously memory bandwidth constrained.
"SoCs on a single board." 😭🤦♂️
There’s a lot of talk about using the vehicles idle computing time to run background processing for Teslas multitude of ventures. Where is this back and forth communication happening? Is it through the vehicles onboard cellular service, or are they using your residential WiFi connection?
Thanks, that clarifies things.
Do you have a source for that memory bandwidth? I'm pretty sure we don't know HW4's specs, or at least we know very few details. But I've been really wanting to know. It's a shame because we got a full technical presentation on HW3 with all the specs and details. Anyway, it doesn't need to be anywhere close to an H100. The point is there are millions of these things, so the total compute is very high. As long as the workload is either small or can be parallelized, then you can run it on this distributed supercomputer.
Folks at Semi Analysis have an article on HW4 specs - https://semianalysis.com/2023/06/27/tesla-ai-capacity-expansion-h100/
Oh my goodness, how are you missing my point? I'm saying thatcdays ago it was only a rumor, which was unsubstantiated, but then Elon came along and confirmed that the rumour was in fact correct.
Mine crypto
Seems to me the Dojo and AIX chip designs had a lot in common and they decided to simplify things by replacing every Dojo chip with a large number of AI6 chips on a single board. So essentially replicating Dojo's compute for training with a bunch of AI6 chips. Does that seem right?
This was my take as well. 1 Dojo chip = multiple AI6 chips on a single board.
I don't think they are going to crowd source compute from AIX chips in all Tesla cars, that would be silly wouldn't it? Elon said: > Dojo 3 arguably lives on in the form of a large number of AI6 SoCs on a single board. Seems like they're going to replace a Dojo chip with multiple AI6 chips. That's all.
This is very interesting and looks credible at first glance, but how the hell did they get this information? I don't get it.
You mean "manufactured" or "foundried"
It's not silly if the car is out working on the Tesla Robotaxi network. It could easily run inference jobs while charging, away from home. Both can be a possibility.
Tesla aren't making a profit this year and stand to lose $25bn with the catastrophic drop in sales.
If you put in a very expensive chip in the car, what is gonna stop a bunch of Kia boys from breaking in and jacking it?
In fairness, Elon said from the start that odds of success for the dojo project were like 10% or less. It was always a risk mitigating effort. Cyber truck and model two are different. Those are legit all in opportunities they fumbled.
Meh, I'm not going to call a front camera an innovation seeing that it's competition had those already for years. That was Tesla playing catch-up. Like if they reinstalled rain sensors or ultrasonic sensors, that's not Innovation either.
Just about everything in the cybertruck is catch up then.
Other than the steer-by-wire, I'd agree with that statement
You said you read 3 days ago it was a rumor and then confirmed yesterday. It was confirmed 3 days ago that it was not a rumor
What are you talking about? They've gone through two quarters so far this year, and both of them were profitable. You should probably stop reading left-wing headlines to get all your information, because it's causing you to be very wrong. Try to be right. If you're unaware, Tesla is a public company, so you can literally just look up their profit numbers for any quarter. Give that a shot rather than regurgitating BS.
Yes. The AI6 chips are not as good for training, but the simplification, cost and scale will make up for it.
Yes. Now the AI six will both do both inference and training.
Tesla wont make a profit this financial year, nor next year and possibly never again. They are not selling enough cars and probably will only sell 50% of what they sold last year.
I would think they need way more training than inference but I’m curious what the actual mix is given how much simulation they’re probably doing
The inference/FSD computer has different requirements than one used for training in a data center though. They pursued Dojo because they needed a specific chip for a specific purpose, something the inference chip will never do the same way Dojo was touted as doing.
Originally, they had teams developing two types of processors: 1. **Dojo** Running Training in the Datacenters (train/create the FSD Model) 2. **AI3/4/5/6** Chips to run Inference in the Vehicles (run the FSD model) Now they know that the AI6 chip will be able to do everything so Dojo and the team behind it can be disbanded. These chips were and will still be designed by Tesla but contract manufactured by others (TSMC, Samsung.... etc.
Originally, they had 2 teams, each developing and supporting 1 of 2 types of processors: 1. **Dojo** Running Training in the Datacenters (train/create the FSD Model) 2. **AI3/4/5/6** Chips to run Inference in the Vehicles (run the FSD model) Now they know that the AI6 chip will be able to do everything so Dojo and the team behind it can be disbanded. These chips were and will still be designed by Tesla but contract manufactured by others (TSMC, Samsung.... etc.
Or did they leave because they knew the program was a dead end/dying? I think either scenario is possible (or maybe somehow both?). These folks would know way more than us about the chip architecture debates within Tesla, and may have seen the writing on the wall or even been told directly many months ago the program was going to end. Put another way, the team that supported Dojo-specific chips may have known they would be able to leave as soon as q2 announcements were made. Internally, Tesla is still referring to the board-packaged arrays of AI6 chips that will be used in the datacenter, sd Dojo3.... so still "technically" a reason for someone to be excited about the future of a modified Dojo program.
If they knew the program was dead/dying, then why did Elon highlight it a month ago at a Q2 earnings call? Doesn't make sense. It would be different if Elon announced the end of Dojo at Q2 earnings call, then I would agree with you. Given that many of the Dojo team left for a startup doing basically Dojo, I think Elon got surprised and now trying to save face.
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nVidia and alphabet both use the same chips for inference and training. now tesla are also doing it. reddit thinks that what tesla is doing is stupid and what nvidia and alphabet are doing is smart, even when they do the same thing...
Today they use Dojo and nVidia. In the future they will add AI6 and nVidia.
Sure, but do you think that'll turn the whole year unprofitable?
It’sa complete lie to save face. He didn’t “make tough personnel decisions” the entire team quit en mass and started their own company. If you still believe anything that comes out of his mouth you are a fool.
I'm not sure why you find it implausible that Elon shut down a project he realized wouldn't work out well.
July of '24 https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1815844918151045153
In his mind the new AI6 matrix packaged boards are the next dojo iteration/evolution, dojo3.... So it's not really lying. Also keeps shareholders happy and less panicky... Obviously this is one take and debatable.
You have no idea what you’re talking about. I can’t imagine so boldly asserting that when you don’t know what happened.
Sounds like a projection post. How close to those projections are we today?
They left because Elon Musk can come up with brilliant ideas that solve some really big problems, but is known to change his mind on a whim. The team itself wanted to stick together and likely will have a multi-billion dollar operation creating TPUs for the big cloud providers to run AI models.
Inaccurate. Dojo was \*competing\* with NVIDIA, which is innovating very fast, and has unlimited money and momentum. So Tesla could not see a path to success for next 5+ years. AI6 is a convergent platform, which can be used for many things. Tesla is investing very heavily in this -- they have booked a new Samsung fab. and I don't think they fired any chip people, most left for startups/rivals, others were reassigned. These are precious people.
Also, NVIDIA chips were just better, and progressing much faster. Tesla couldn't compete with their core competency.
By make the chips, its understood you are designing the chips. Everyone except Intel is 'designing' chips.
SoC is the name of a single chip that replaces the multiple chips on a board (multiple processing cores, north bridge, south bridge all in one). He is arguing that if there is more than one SoC on a board then it's no longer an SoC. I'm not sure that I agree as each SoC could still be its own board, they are just being put on the same board for space consolidation when more compute is needed.
Well he said they gave up on that and will be using chips made by Samsung. That's still false if you assume "made by" means "designed by". Samsung won't be designing these chips. Tesla will.
Tesla dojo would have been made by TSMC probably. Samsung and TSMC are chip fabs meaning they take your design and mass manufacture it for you. Apple, Nvidia, and AMD all fab their chips with Samsung or TSMC The only thing here is that Dojo's price to performance is not better than Nvidia chips so for training compute they will stop the dojo program. AI6 has some potential to supplement Teslas training compute in the future.
Tesla has never truly considered fabing their own chips. TSMC and Samsung fab like 90% of all new chips. Even Nvidia fabs their chips with TSMC. Tesla, Nvidia, Apple, and AMD all design their own chips and then gave TSMC or Samsung manufacture the chips
Tesla thinks that their AI6 could be good enough to be used both for FSD and training in the datacenter. It did not make sense anymore to keep developing Dojo 2 as it was very expensive and would not keep up with Nvidia anyways, better to put resources into AI6+ and have it be the single solution for FSD, training, Optimus and etc. You can think of AI6 ultimately being what Dojo 3 would have been.
LLM performance scales with memory utilization. Segmenting your nodes by cellular levels of latenancy would be horrendous. You need sub millisecond performance for it to even be remotely plausible.
They probably can sell it or donate it to university for simulation or modeling
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