TECH NEWS – Elon Musk’s company has suffered a significant blow: the head of the project founded his own AI company and took key team members with him.
Tesla has reportedly halted development of the Dojo supercomputer, originally intended for Full Self-Driving (FSD) and other advanced features, in favor of relying more on external partners such as Nvidia. The Dojo initiative was among the first mainstream efforts to fully tap into the supercomputing sector. Working with partners like TSMC, Tesla aimed to harness massive computing power to support its FSD ambitions and other autonomous projects, including humanoid robots.
According to Bloomberg, the decision comes as Peter Bannon, who led the Dojo team, has departed to launch his own startup, DensityAI. Around 20 Tesla employees are reported to have followed him. The reduced workforce has prompted Tesla to reassign remaining team members to internal data center projects. More crucially, the company is shifting toward a model where external providers play a greater role in meeting its computational demands, ensuring no compromise in performance for projects like FSD.
Beyond the intensifying competition in the AI space, one of the primary factors behind the project’s discontinuation is the severe loss of talent. Bloomberg notes that Ganesh Venkataramanan, another former Dojo leader, has also established DensityAI, attracting several ex-Tesla engineers. In light of this exodus, Elon Musk opted to shut down the project. However, he remains confident about the progress at xAI, which is currently building massive hyperscale data centers in the United States to power Tesla’s AI-driven initiatives.
With Dojo now off the table, questions remain over the fate of Tesla’s recently signed deal with Samsung for AI6 chips—an agreement closely tied to the automaker’s ambitions in AI semiconductor development.
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