Tesla Disbands Dojo Supercomputer Team in Blow to AI Effort

Via Ed Niedermeyer on BlueSky. Article text: Tesla Inc. is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer team and its leader will depart the company, according to people familiar with the matter, upending the automaker’s effort to develop in-house chips for driverless technology. Peter Bannon, who was heading up Dojo, is leaving and Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has ordered the effort to be shut down, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. The team has lost about 20 workers recently to newly formed DensityAI, and remaining Dojo workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the people said.

Seems significant given Tesla is now an AI and robotics company, and some of the insane valuations placed on the Dojo program. The bulls will say it’s a nothingburger though.

Tesla can't hold onto talents employees anymore.

It sounds like Tesla can't compete with all the other AI companies. I saw some of the salaries of AI workers and it is insane, some of them are getting $100million a year allegedly. It makes me wonder if Tesla are having cashflow problems if they are cutting costs.

Dojo inflated the stock price for a while there, which was likely its primary purpose

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They announced a chip deal today with Samsung based on Dojo. Sounds like Elon has lost his rag and told them all to piss off.

dojo got doged

AFAIK, Musk created xAI with Tesla-supplied hardware to apparently compete with Tesla & the Dojo effort. Now he’s trying to get Tesla to buy xAI (and take on his Twitter debt he transferred to xAI) & have xAI do FSD development. What a shit show.

I am sure Adam Jonas will adjust his valuation accordingly.

Dojo is a dodo.

TSLA tomorrow: 🚀

That thing that everyone with experience in the field knew would happen, finally happened. Musk's dumb bets all seem to explode on a long enough time frame, the only question if we're all alive to see it.

Yeah this isn't just for average AI experts but Meta reportedly pay one of their top AI employee $250 million over 4 years. The top talent is on a fortune, so much money sloshing around in AI. [https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/at-250-million-top-ai-salaries-dwarf-those-of-the-manhattan-project-and-the-space-race/](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/08/at-250-million-top-ai-salaries-dwarf-those-of-the-manhattan-project-and-the-space-race/)

Cant say I have heard of 1m salaries.

It's an awesome day . . . for NVIDIA stock owners.

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Remember when Adam Jonas of Morgan Stanley fame said Dojo would add $500B worth of value to Tesla?

I seriously don't remember what Dojo was supposed to be doing.

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Dojo is a nomo.

Vague AI or something, *insert "compute" phrase* ... something *stutter* something "training" and other buzzwords. It apparently wasn't actually doing anything or else it couldn't be so easily disbanded. It served its purpose as an earnings call pump.

Bulls will say it massively slashes CapEx and boosts profit margins, so watch out for a $50 boost to the stock price.

At some point Tesla investors have to start asking why Tesla is paying one of Elon’s other companies to do something he promised Tesla would excel at.

Yes. I want it. So I can short hard.

Samsung probably took a look at the chip and told him it couldn’t be fabbed.

Was this decision made with ketamine, or between fixes?

Dōmo arigatō dojo

Elon is going all in on diners.

Doing it so Musk has an excuse to outsource the work to xAI, transferring more TSLA capital away from shareholders and to him...

Bullish for the stock!!!

That's pretty wild, the amount of money being spent on AI is crazy and a lot of it won't make a return.

And getting $40 Billion in Tesla shares for driving it over a cliff.

No one questions the cult leader.

I knew Dojo was a scam. It was supposed to be made with Tesla designed chips instead of Nvidia chips. But there was never any reason to think Tesla could design chips better than Nvidia. But the fanboys ate it up of course.

It was supposed to pump the stock, do fuck all until people forgot about it, and then be quietly dispended with little acknowledgement of its failure or consequence for the stock price. I remember the chip reveal was really hyped and all the sycophants were drooling about how Tesla would be the leader in chip design.... blah blah blah... Tesla is a world of lies built on Elon Musk's endless pile of bullshit. When it falls..... what else will it take with it?

the pictures they made were pretty

As stain on your resumee.

Wow another TSLA “bull thesis” that turned out to be a crock of shit. Obviously anyone with a brain knew. But as usual the ret@rd TSLA bag holding cult moved on to the next fraudulent hype thesis. In fact we’re about 5 fake hype projects beyond dojo now, so really this is very old news. If anyone is confused about how it was obvious… every time Elon was asked about dojo in an earnings call (literally every quarterly earnings call for the past 2 years) he would give the most ret@rded nonsense answers that obviously indicated it’s going no where. That’s also how we know robotaxi and Optimus are bullshit disasters internally as well. Tesla has a LONG list of failures. Really they’re just “the model y company” because that’s their only product.

Tesla will own Twitter and Musk will pocket about 200 billion he is asking for it.

The stock is the product. All he need to do tomorrow to pump is to dangle a new set of keys in front of his followers

IIRC some sort of simulator that creates driving situation for the self driving code to train on. Experts have always said you can't plan the unplannable.

Oh def. Heard about numbers far exceeding that for known engineers. The true talent pool is exceptionally small and known. It’s poaching season.

To be fair, it was his most honest launch. He literally said in the launch that the chips might not ever make it past bench testing.

They don’t seem to care, nor does the Tesla board.

but twitter is worth way more now, trust me bro - elon, probably

Dojo originally was suppose to be a custom ASIC to run AI training power efficiently. At some point it pivoted to be a "supercomputer" coordinating the training done on Nvidia GPU clusters. But who really knows how real any of it was.

> Seems significant given Tesla is now an AI and robotics company LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.... did you type that with a straight face? By chance, is Tesla also an autonomous taxi/ride share company too...?

he forcing his twitter garbage to his gullible tesla shareholders throat

That was his CYA for court but he knew his cult would ignore that statement and open their wallets

I thought that guy refused the Meta offer because the expected deliverables were unreasonable and he wouldn't actually be paid that in reality.

I cannot imagine people already forgot how Elon Musk hyped the Dojo chips/supercomputer not long ago. It turns out Dojo is nothing and Elon has nothing special.

A self-driving car company that doesn't have an AI team.

he got higher package at his current place. also, fuck zuck

"Forget about Dojo, instead you'll get Grok spouting Nazi propaganda in your car, that's where the value is"

I think the previous poster wrote that because that's the line Elon has tried to push: forget about cars, it's all about AI, robots and Cybercab now

Yeah the whole thing has very late 90s vibes.

where is the evidence that this attempted takeover of his own company (which is incredibly sketchy) has anything to do with fsd development?

You are late in the curve. Tesla is a slow service diner company now.

Adam Jonas said that Dojo was a $500B boost to the company's valuation.

We've pivoted to humanoid robots bro

Funny you people never saw black hawk down. With cybertruck

For Elon. Putting are troops better than an armored Humvee

Our

Pivoted to space themed old timey roadside diners a while back

3 card monte

Short works when players act rational. Beware.

Wow. Tesla traded leadership in profitable and (let's be fair) decent EVs ahead of their time, to instead bet AI would make FSD and robots real. Tesla abandoned the original plan for an innovatively manufactured cheap Model 2 EV. Now AI is in chaos - time for regrooving. And not long before, the head of robots left, and the current Optimus (which has many problems; overheating, limited battery life, limited agility, and the AI does not work for it) is back for regrooving. Guts moves, in a way -- admitting failure (without publicly admitting it) in robots and AI, and doubling down on them.

You mean they DON’T want to work 80+ hrs/week and sleep under their desks as some sort of ridiculous loyalty pledge??? And when Elmo says he’s working 80+ hours per week, is he really??? I don’t consider bullshit interviews and nonstop tweeting actual work.

Optimus is the new Dojo. Any guesses what the new Optimus will be?!

Dojo was going to be running self driving for every other car firm plus trucking plus robotoaxis plus Optimus, or something.

But how?! Just last week al tesla fanboy channels were telling me Dojo will destroy nVidia. Deal with samsung was Elon master plan to secure it's production! Tesla is AI leader after all. They have their own hardware and no one else does, that's unfathomable advantage no one else has! /s

This is why you buy an inverse-leveraged ETF and play the long game.

Or it could be an AI bubble that is going to sort itself out in the market eventually.

Because what's the alternative? Admit its all BS and their tech savant god-emperor is actually a terrible CEO? All that would mean is nuking the stock price into the 40's and eventually getting bought out by GM when their cash reserves run dry.

Last earnings call he said something like XAi compute was like 100x Dojo and it was only used for some specific use case…

Musk: “Where it's basically the same chip that is used where you say two of them in a car or Optimus and maybe a larger number on a board account of five twelve on a board or something like that, if you want high bandwidth communication between the chips. That's sort of seems like intuitively the sensible way to go.”

You mean MechaHitler?

Superpowers for everyone

How many more failures before the Tesla board of directors finally fires Elon?

As long as the stock price rises, infinitely many. The real product of Tesla has never been the cars, or the taxi, or the robots. It’s always been the stock.

You mean the everything app?

Except then you are open to volatility decay. Trying to hold a short position on a volatile inverse leveraged ETF is far from a good investment.

Ahhh, understood.

Ding ding!

Those r definitely words.

it's pumping lol

That's fair. I don't know a lot about them, which is why I don't do that. But it does seem like a better choice than trying to play with pits and calls given the average person's stock market knowledge and the behavior of this stock

And the stock is up 4%. It’s actually comical at this point. I’ve never seen a stock that is completely detached from any negative news in my lifetime.

Remember how all the bulls said that dojo was going to provide earnings and a moat because it would be cheaper AND more efficient to do it all in house? Strangely they don’t feel stopping it is now a net negative.

Started xAI with top of the line NVIDIA hardware from Tesla's AI efforts and staffed with poached Tesla engineers.

Musk being ousted from Tesla would probably tank the share price more than any other thing he himself could possibly do. At this point, it's in their best interest to find reasons to keep him onboard. That's why it's so easy for him to spout out the same bullshit in every investor call despite never delivering on almost any of it.

Thanks for adding this to the narrative. I forgot that detail.

You can't make this up: Dojo discontinued because developer ran away, Tesla is missing the greates european auto show, terrible fundamentals: Tesla +3.21%

So much fuckery it's hard to keep it all straight.

Are there still people out there who think Dojo actually existed at any point? It literally became a bimonthly curated box of snacks

I hope it all blows up in his face when he eventually sell xAI to Tesla.

AI is the bargaining chip

most people here don't even know what dojo is lol. I feel like it is worth reading into difference between xAI and dojo, they are very very different entities.

Underrated comment

TSLA is down 6% over the past 6 months TSLQ (2X inverse) is down 50%

This is why I'm not a financial advisor. Damn. Didn't realize they were THAT bad.

In one of the bios, there's a story about Elmo building a fake supercomputer at the Zip2 offices to impress Compaq (his initial dot-com windfall). He's not even very creative on his scams, the one thing he is actually good at.

Emails from the Musk/OpenAI lawsuit where he tried to do the same thing there and acquire them by Tesla, explicitly for FSD: > The “second stage” would be a full self driving solution based on large-scale neural network training, which OpenAI expertise could significantly help accelerate. With a functioning full self-driving solution in ~2-3 years [lol that's not what he was telling investors and car buyers] we could sell a lot of cars/trucks. If we do this really well, the transportation industry is large enough that we could increase Tesla's market cap to high O(~100K), and use that revenue to fund the AI work at the appropriate scale. https://www.reddit.com/r/RealTesla/comments/1b7pilb/in_a_2018_email_from_musk_to_openai_elon_reveals/

It was supposed to be making something like Google's TPUs, following Waymo's lead, to get away from Nvidia's margins.

I’m still waiting for it to be the anything app… just do anything

Bullish! Stocks will for sure go up now!

Elon’s too cheap to pay for the kind of talent needed to design new processors from the ground up. Tesla’s strategy in recent years seems to be throwing lowball offers at every 24 year old engineering grad and overwork them to induce a high turnover rate. Big Balls’ roommate who just learned Verilog a year ago probably isn’t going to make any breakthroughs in parallel processing anytime soon.

Basically, is anyone but musk via shell purchases and meme stock players seriously buying Tesla? The Tesla board of directors dumped their shares months ago ffs.

Yeah, I thought you needed thousands of highly qualified people to design modern chips, not like 20 or so.

No Elon is just lying as always

What happened to all that, shouldn't those features be ready by now

Did Tesla ever really design any chips? Has anyone ever seen one of them apart from the probably fake one waved around on stage at one of their cringe 'AI days'?

Once I read that story it was clear he could never be trusted. I mean what kind of legit businessman does that.

Right, it was just for show

I don't believe they ever designed any chips

They were never really profitable.

Nobody has ever seen one of these supposed Dojo chips to my knowledge.

Dojo never existed. You're talking about it as though it was something real.

Only two explanations: Musk lied again on the conference call a few weeks ago - or he was completely clueless about key people jumping ship from Tesla soon. Scary either way…

Eventually the music stops. It happened with Enron it will eventually happen with Tesla. It will be a fast collapse in a matter of months if not weeks when it does.

Yeah my memory was flawed. It was a new super computer or something. It was so long ago.... Which is the point right? Grift to pump stock, disappear grift.

Apple lost Steve Jobs and has never been of higher value

Has he given up on boring tunnels?

Well they did claim to be designing them, I am just sure it was a lie.

His brother is on the board iirc

Massive difference. Steve Jobs was not ousted from Apple due to horrible mismanagement (well, not a second time anyway).

For me it was hyperloop. I think I probably read a lot of the same sci-fi books as Elmo when I was an awkward teenager in the late 80s.

The alternative is to sell the stock because it clearly isn't worth the current price.

He's definitely read William Gibson, he ripped off the orbital refuelling scene from Neuromancer