Elon Musk confirms shutdown of Tesla Dojo, ‘an evolutionary dead end’

Elon Musk confirmed over the weekend reports that Tesla has disbanded the team working on its Dojo AI training supercomputer, just weeks after announcing he expected to have Tesla’s second cluster operating “at scale” in 2026.

“Once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary dead end,” Musk posted on X, the social media platform he owns, on Sunday. “Dojo 3 arguably lives on in the form of a large number of AI6 [systems-on-a-chip] on a single board.”

After bringing its first Dojo supercomputer to life and powering it with a mix of Nvidia GPUs and in-house-made D1 chips, Tesla had planned to build a second Dojo factory – referred to by Musk as “Dojo 2” – that would have been powered by a second-generation D2 chip.

It appears the D2 chip under development has been shelved along with the broader Dojo project as Tesla shifts its focus to its AI5 and AI6 chips, which are being manufactured by TSMC and Samsung, respectively. The AI5 chip is primarily built to power FSD, Tesla’s driver assistance system, while AI6 is designed for both onboard inference – meaning, it promises to power self-driving in cars and autonomous capabilities in humanoid robots – and large-scale AI training.

“It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs,” Musk posted late Friday evening. “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.”

He added that for a supercomputer cluster, it makes more 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,” he said.

Musk has talked about Dojo since 2019, reiterating that Dojo would be a cornerstone of Tesla’s mission to achieve full self-driving and commercialize humanoid robots. Talk of Dojo halted around August 2024 when Musk began touting Cortex instead, a “giant new AI training supercluster being built at Tesla HQ in Austin to solve real-world AI.”

It’s not clear if Cortex is still in the works. TechCrunch has reached out to Tesla to learn more, as well as to inquire about the fate of the Dojo facility Tesla had invested $500 million to build in Buffalo, New York.

The shift in strategy comes at a time when Tesla is experiencing falling EV sales and significant brand damage after Musk’s forays into politics. Musk has worked to convince investors that Tesla still has a future in autonomy, despite a slow and limited robotaxi launch in Austin this past June that resulted in numerous reported incidents of the vehicles exhibiting problematic driving behavior.