Elon Musk doesn’t need Tesla to be simply an automaker. He desires Tesla to be an AI corporate, one who’s found out the right way to make vehicles force themselves.
A very powerful to that challenge used to be Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed through Tesla to coach its Complete Self-Using (FSD) neural networks. FSD isn’t in fact absolutely self-driving; it may well carry out some automatic using duties, however nonetheless calls for an attentive human at the back of the wheel. However Tesla thinks with extra information, extra compute energy and extra coaching, it may well pass the edge from virtually self-driving to complete self-driving.
And that’s the place Dojo used to be meant to return in.
Musk teased Dojo for years and ramped up discussions in regards to the supercomputer during 2024. However Dojo is now out, and every other supercomputer known as Cortex has entered the chat.
Underneath is a timeline of Dojo mentions and guarantees. Take a look at this explainer on what Dojo for much more data on what it used to be, why it mattered, and what comes subsequent.
2019
First mentions of Dojo
April 22 – At Tesla’s Autonomy Day, the automaker had its AI workforce onstage to speak about Autopilot and Complete Self-Using, and the AI powering them each. The corporate stocks details about Tesla’s custom-built chips which can be designed in particular for neural networks and self-driving vehicles.
All the way through the development, Musk teases Dojo, revealing that it’s a supercomputer for coaching AI. He additionally notes that each one Tesla vehicles being produced on the time would have all {hardware} vital for complete self-driving and most effective wanted a instrument replace.
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2020
Musk starts the Dojo roadshow
Feb 2 – Musk says Tesla will quickly have greater than 1,000,000 hooked up automobiles international with sensors and compute wanted for complete self-driving — and touts Dojo’s features.
“Dojo, our coaching supercomputer, will be capable to procedure huge quantities of video coaching information & successfully run hyperspace arrays with a limiteless selection of parameters, quite a few reminiscence & ultra-high bandwidth between cores. Extra in this later.”
August 14 – Musk reiterates Tesla’s plan to increase a neural community coaching pc known as Dojo “to procedure really huge quantities of video information,” calling it “a beast.” He additionally says the primary model of Dojo is “a few 12 months away,” which might put its release date someplace round August 2021.
December 31 – Elon says Dojo isn’t wanted, however it’s going to make self-driving higher. “It isn’t sufficient to be more secure than human drivers, Autopilot in the end must be greater than 10 occasions more secure than human drivers.”
2021
Tesla makes Dojo legit
August 19 – The automaker formally broadcasts Dojo at Tesla’s first AI Day, an tournament intended to draw engineers to Tesla’s AI workforce. Tesla additionally introduces its D1 chip, which the automaker says it’s going to use — along Nvidia’s GPU — to energy the Dojo supercomputer. Tesla notes its AI cluster will area 3,000 D1 chips.
October 12 – Tesla releases a Dojo Era whitepaper, “a information to Tesla’s configurable floating level codecs & mathematics.” The whitepaper outlines a technical same old for a brand new form of binary floating-point mathematics that’s utilized in deep finding out neural networks and may also be applied “completely in instrument, completely in {hardware}, or in any aggregate of instrument and {hardware}.”
2022
Tesla unearths Dojo development
August 12 – Musk says Tesla will “section in Dojo. Gained’t wish to purchase as many incremental GPUs subsequent 12 months.”
September 30 – At Tesla’s moment AI Day, the corporate unearths that it has put in the primary Dojo cupboard, trying out 2.2 megawatts of load trying out. Tesla says it used to be construction one tile consistent with day (which is made up of 25 D1 chips). Tesla demos Dojo onstage operating a Solid Diffusion fashion to create an AI-generated symbol of a “Cybertruck on Mars.”
Importantly, the corporate units a goal date of a complete Exapod cluster to be finished through Q1 2023, and says it plans to construct a complete of 7 Exapods in Palo Alto.
2023
A ‘long-shot wager‘
April 19 – Musk tells buyers right through Tesla’s first-quarter income that Dojo “has the opportunity of an order of magnitude growth in the price of coaching,” and in addition “has the prospective to change into a sellable carrier that we’d be offering to different corporations in the similar approach that Amazon Internet Services and products provides internet products and services.”
Musk additionally notes that he’d “take a look at Dojo as more or less a long-shot wager,” however a “wager value making.”
June 21 – The Tesla AI X account posts that the corporate’s neural networks are already in buyer automobiles. The thread features a graph with a timeline of Tesla’s present and projected compute energy, which puts the beginning of Dojo manufacturing at July 2023, even if it’s no longer transparent if this refers back to the D1 chips or the supercomputer itself. Musk says that very same day that Dojo used to be already on-line and operating duties at Tesla information facilities.
The corporate additionally tasks that Tesla’s compute would be the best 5 in all of the international through round February 2024 (there aren’t any indications this used to be a hit) and that Tesla would succeed in 100 exaflops through October 2024.
July 19 – Tesla notes in its second-quarter income record it has began manufacturing of Dojo. Musk additionally says Tesla plans to spend greater than $1 billion on Dojo via 2024.
September 6 – Musk posts on X that Tesla is restricted through AI coaching compute, however that Nvidia and Dojo will repair that. He says managing the information from the kind of 160 billion frames of video Tesla will get from its vehicles consistent with day is terribly tricky.
2024
Plans to scale
January 24 – All the way through Tesla’s fourth-quarter and full-year income name, Musk recognizes once more that Dojo is a high-risk, high-reward challenge. He additionally says that Tesla used to be pursuing “the twin trail of Nvidia and Dojo,” that “Dojo is operating” and is “doing coaching jobs.” He notes Tesla is scaling it up and has “plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3 and whatnot.”
January 26 – Tesla introduced plans to spend $500 million to construct a Dojo supercomputer in Buffalo. Musk then downplays the funding quite, posting on X that whilst $500 million is a huge sum, it’s “most effective equal to a 10k H100 machine from Nvidia. Tesla will spend greater than that on Nvidia {hardware} this 12 months. The desk stakes for being aggressive in AI are a minimum of a number of billion greenbacks consistent with 12 months at this level.”
April 30 – At TSMC’s North American Era Symposium, the corporate says Dojo’s next-generation coaching tile — the D2, which places all of the Dojo tile onto a unmarried silicon wafer, moderately than connecting 25 chips to make one tile — is already in manufacturing, in keeping with IEEE Spectrum.
Might 20 – Musk notes that the rear portion of the Giga Texas manufacturing unit extension will come with the development of “a perfect dense, water-cooled supercomputer cluster.”
June 4 – A CNBC record unearths Musk diverted 1000’s of Nvidia chips reserved for Tesla to X and xAI. After to begin with announcing the record used to be false, Musk posts on X that Tesla didn’t have a location to ship the Nvidia chips to show them on, because of the ongoing development at the south extension of Giga Texas, “so they’d have simply sat in a warehouse.” He famous the extension will “area 50k H100s for FSD coaching.”
He additionally posts:
“Of the kind of $10B in AI-related expenditures I stated Tesla would make this 12 months, about part is inside, essentially the Tesla-designed AI inference pc and sensors found in all of our vehicles, plus Dojo. For construction the AI coaching superclusters, NVidia {hardware} is ready 2/3 of the fee. My present absolute best bet for Nvidia purchases through Tesla are $3B to $4B this 12 months.”
July 1 – Musk unearths on X that present Tesla automobiles would possibly not have the precise {hardware} for the corporate’s next-gen AI fashion. He says that the kind of 5x build up in parameter rely with the next-gen AI “may be very tricky to reach with out upgrading the automobile inference pc.”
Nvidia provide demanding situations
July 23 – All the way through Tesla’s second-quarter income name, Musk says call for for Nvidia {hardware} is “so excessive that it’s steadily tricky to get the GPUs.”
“I feel this due to this fact calls for that we put much more effort on Dojo so as to be sure that we’ve were given the educational capacity that we’d like,” Musk says. “And we do see a trail to being aggressive with Nvidia with Dojo.”
A graph in Tesla’s investor deck predicts that Tesla AI coaching capability will ramp to kind of 90,000 H100 equal GPUs through the top of 2024, up from round 40,000 in June. Later that day on X, Musk posts that Dojo 1 could have “kind of 8k H100-equivalent of coaching on-line through finish of 12 months.” He additionally posts pictures of the supercomputer, which seems to make use of the similar fridge-like chrome steel external as Tesla’s Cybertrucks.
From Dojo to Cortex
July 30 – AI5 is ~18 months clear of high-volume manufacturing, Musk says in a answer to a put up from any individual claiming to start out a membership of “Tesla HW4/AI4 homeowners offended about getting left at the back of when AI5 comes out.”
August 3 – Musk posts on X that he did a walkthrough of “the Tesla supercompute cluster at Giga Texas (aka Cortex).” He notes that it will be made kind of of 100,000 H100/H200 Nvidia GPUs with “large garage for video coaching of FSD & Optimus.”
August 26 – Musk posts on X a video of Cortex, which he refers to as “the large new AI coaching supercluster being constructed at Tesla HQ in Austin to resolve real-world AI.”
2025
Dojo shutdown, its workforce disbanded
January 29 – Tesla’s This fall and full-year 2024 income name incorporated no point out of Dojo. Cortex, Tesla’s new AI coaching supercluster on the Austin gigafactory, did make an look, alternatively. Tesla famous in its shareholder deck that it finished the deployment of Cortex, which is made up of kind of 50,000 H100 Nvidia GPUs.
“Cortex helped allow V13 of FSD (Supervised), which boasts main enhancements in protection and luxury due to 4.2x build up in information, upper solution video inputs … amongst different improvements,” in keeping with the letter.
All the way through the decision, CFO Vaibhav Taneja famous that Tesla speeded up the buildout of Cortex to hurry up the rollout of FSD V13. He stated that collected AI-related capital expenditures, together with infrastructure, “thus far has been roughly $5 billion.” In 2025, Taneja stated he expects capex to be flat because it pertains to AI.
July 23 – All the way through Tesla’s Q2 2025 income name, Musk stated Dojo 2 used to be anticipated to be “working at scale” someday in 2026, with “scale being someplace round 100k H100 equal.” In the similar breath, he hinted at imaginable redundancies.
“Excited about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it kind of feels like intuitively, we would like to check out to search out convergence there, the place it’s mainly the similar chip,” Musk stated.
July 28 – Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal to get its next-generation AI6 chips from Samsung. The AI6 chip is Tesla’s wager on a chip design that may scale from powering FSD and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots to high-performance AI coaching in information facilities.
August 6 – Bloomberg reviews that just about 20 Dojo staff left to start out their very own corporate that builds AI chips, instrument, and {hardware} known as DensityAI.
August 7 – Bloomberg reviews that Tesla has disbanded its Dojo workforce and close down the challenge. Peter Bannon, Dojo’s lead, left the corporate, as smartly.
Musk spoke back to the reviews on X, announcing: “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its assets and scale two relatively other AI chip designs. The Tesla AI5, AI6 and next chips can be superb for inference and a minimum of beautiful excellent for coaching. All effort is fascinated with that.”
August 10 – “As soon as it become transparent that each one paths converged to AI6, I needed to close down Dojo and make some difficult group of workers alternatives, as Dojo 2 used to be now an evolutionary lifeless finish,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns. “Dojo 3 arguably lives on within the type of a lot of AI6 [systems-on-a-chip] on a unmarried board.”
September 1 – Tesla stocks its Grasp Plan Section IV on social media platform X. There’s no point out of Dojo or Cortex, even if AI, and extra in particular, “bodily AI” takes a central position.
This tale at first printed August 10, 2024. The overall replace of the Tesla Dojo timeline printed September 2, 2025.
