Elon Musk doesn’t need Tesla to be simply an automaker. He needs Tesla to be an AI firm, one which’s found out methods to make automobiles drive themselves.
Essential to that mission was Dojo, a custom-built supercomputer designed by Tesla to coach its Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural networks. FSD isn’t really totally self-driving; it may carry out some automated driving duties, however nonetheless requires an attentive human behind the wheel. However Tesla thinks with extra information, extra compute energy and extra coaching, it may cross the edge from virtually self-driving to full self-driving.
And that’s the place Dojo was supposed to return in.
Musk teased Dojo for years and ramped up discussions concerning the supercomputer all through 2024. However Dojo is now out, and one other supercomputer known as Cortex has entered the chat.
Under is a timeline of Dojo mentions and guarantees. Take a look at this explainer on what Dojo for much more data on what it was, 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 Full Self-Driving, and the AI powering them each. The corporate shares details about Tesla’s custom-built chips which can be designed particularly for neural networks and self-driving automobiles.
Throughout the occasion, Musk teases Dojo, revealing that it’s a supercomputer for coaching AI. He additionally notes that every one Tesla automobiles being produced on the time would have all {hardware} mandatory for full self-driving and solely wanted a software program replace.
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2020
Musk begins the Dojo roadshow
Feb 2 – Musk says Tesla will quickly have greater than 1,000,000 related autos worldwide with sensors and compute wanted for full self-driving — and touts Dojo’s capabilities.
“Dojo, our coaching supercomputer, will be capable to course of huge quantities of video coaching information & effectively run hyperspace arrays with an unlimited variety of parameters, loads of reminiscence & ultra-high bandwidth between cores. Extra on this later.”
August 14 – Musk reiterates Tesla’s plan to develop a neural community coaching laptop known as Dojo “to course of actually huge quantities of video information,” calling it “a beast.” He additionally says the primary model of Dojo is “a few yr away,” which might put its launch 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 safer than human drivers, Autopilot in the end must be greater than 10 occasions safer than human drivers.”
2021
Tesla makes Dojo official
August 19 – The automaker formally publicizes Dojo at Tesla’s first AI Day, an occasion meant to draw engineers to Tesla’s AI workforce. Tesla additionally introduces its D1 chip, which the automaker says it’s going to use — alongside Nvidia’s GPU — to energy the Dojo supercomputer. Tesla notes its AI cluster will home 3,000 D1 chips.
October 12 – Tesla releases a Dojo Expertise whitepaper, “a information to Tesla’s configurable floating level codecs & arithmetic.” The whitepaper outlines a technical customary for a brand new sort of binary floating-point arithmetic that’s utilized in deep studying neural networks and might be applied “totally in software program, totally in {hardware}, or in any mixture of software program and {hardware}.”
2022
Tesla reveals Dojo progress
August 12 – Musk says Tesla will “section in Dojo. Gained’t want to purchase as many incremental GPUs subsequent yr.”
September 30 – At Tesla’s second AI Day, the corporate reveals that it has put in the primary Dojo cupboard, testing 2.2 megawatts of load testing. Tesla says it was constructing one tile per day (which is made up of 25 D1 chips). Tesla demos Dojo onstage operating a Secure Diffusion mannequin to create an AI-generated picture of a “Cybertruck on Mars.”
Importantly, the corporate units a goal date of a full Exapod cluster to be accomplished by Q1 2023, and says it plans to construct a complete of seven Exapods in Palo Alto.
2023
A ‘long-shot wager‘
April 19 – Musk tells buyers throughout Tesla’s first-quarter earnings that Dojo “has the potential for an order of magnitude enchancment in the price of coaching,” and likewise “has the potential to turn into a sellable service that we might provide to different corporations in the identical manner that Amazon Net Providers affords net companies.”
Musk additionally notes that he’d “have a look at Dojo as sort of 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 autos. The thread features a graph with a timeline of Tesla’s present and projected compute energy, which locations the beginning of Dojo manufacturing at July 2023, though it’s not clear if this refers back to the D1 chips or the supercomputer itself. Musk says that very same day that Dojo was already on-line and operating duties at Tesla information facilities.
The corporate additionally initiatives that Tesla’s compute would be the prime 5 in your entire world by round February 2024 (there are not any indications this was profitable) and that Tesla would attain 100 exaflops by October 2024.
July 19 – Tesla notes in its second-quarter earnings report it has began manufacturing of Dojo. Musk additionally says Tesla plans to spend greater than $1 billion on Dojo by 2024.
September 6 – Musk posts on X that Tesla is proscribed by AI coaching compute, however that Nvidia and Dojo will repair that. He says managing the info from the roughly 160 billion frames of video Tesla will get from its automobiles per day is extraordinarily tough.
2024
Plans to scale
January 24 – Throughout Tesla’s fourth-quarter and full-year earnings name, Musk acknowledges once more that Dojo is a high-risk, high-reward undertaking. He additionally says that Tesla was pursuing “the twin path of Nvidia and Dojo,” that “Dojo is working” 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 considerably, posting on X that whereas $500 million is a big sum, it’s “solely equal to a 10k H100 system from Nvidia. Tesla will spend greater than that on Nvidia {hardware} this yr. The desk stakes for being aggressive in AI are no less than a number of billion {dollars} per yr at this level.”
April 30 – At TSMC’s North American Expertise Symposium, the corporate says Dojo’s next-generation coaching tile — the D2, which places your entire Dojo tile onto a single silicon wafer, relatively than connecting 25 chips to make one tile — is already in manufacturing, in response to IEEE Spectrum.
Could 20 – Musk notes that the rear portion of the Giga Texas manufacturing unit extension will embrace the development of “an excellent dense, water-cooled supercomputer cluster.”
June 4 – A CNBC report reveals Musk diverted 1000’s of Nvidia chips reserved for Tesla to X and xAI. After initially saying the report was false, Musk posts on X that Tesla didn’t have a location to ship the Nvidia chips to show them on, as a result of continued building on the south extension of Giga Texas, “so they’d have simply sat in a warehouse.” He famous the extension will “home 50k H100s for FSD coaching.”
He additionally posts:
“Of the roughly $10B in AI-related expenditures I stated Tesla would make this yr, about half is inside, primarily the Tesla-designed AI inference laptop and sensors current in all of our automobiles, plus Dojo. For constructing the AI coaching superclusters, NVidia {hardware} is about 2/3 of the price. My present greatest guess for Nvidia purchases by Tesla are $3B to $4B this yr.”
July 1 – Musk reveals on X that present Tesla autos could not have the appropriate {hardware} for the corporate’s next-gen AI mannequin. He says that the roughly 5x improve in parameter depend with the next-gen AI “could be very tough to realize with out upgrading the automobile inference laptop.”
Nvidia provide challenges
July 23 – Throughout Tesla’s second-quarter earnings name, Musk says demand for Nvidia {hardware} is “so excessive that it’s typically tough to get the GPUs.”
“I believe this due to this fact requires that we put much more effort on Dojo to be able to be certain that we’ve received the coaching functionality that we want,” Musk says. “And we do see a path to being aggressive with Nvidia with Dojo.”
A graph in Tesla’s investor deck predicts that Tesla AI coaching capability will ramp to roughly 90,000 H100 equal GPUs by the top of 2024, up from round 40,000 in June. Later that day on X, Musk posts that Dojo 1 may have “roughly 8k H100-equivalent of coaching on-line by finish of yr.” He additionally posts images of the supercomputer, which seems to make use of the identical fridge-like chrome steel exterior as Tesla’s Cybertrucks.
From Dojo to Cortex
July 30 – AI5 is ~18 months away from high-volume manufacturing, Musk says in a reply to a put up from somebody claiming to start out a membership of “Tesla HW4/AI4 homeowners indignant about getting left behind 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 might be made roughly of 100,000 H100/H200 Nvidia GPUs with “huge storage 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 unravel real-world AI.”
2025
Dojo shutdown, its workforce disbanded
January 29 – Tesla’s This fall and full-year 2024 earnings name included no point out of Dojo. Cortex, Tesla’s new AI coaching supercluster on the Austin gigafactory, did make an look, nonetheless. Tesla famous in its shareholder deck that it accomplished the deployment of Cortex, which is made up of roughly 50,000 H100 Nvidia GPUs.
“Cortex helped allow V13 of FSD (Supervised), which boasts main enhancements in security and luxury due to 4.2x improve in information, increased decision video inputs … amongst different enhancements,” in response to the letter.
Throughout the name, CFO Vaibhav Taneja famous that Tesla accelerated the buildout of Cortex to hurry up the rollout of FSD V13. He stated that accrued AI-related capital expenditures, together with infrastructure, “up to now has been roughly $5 billion.” In 2025, Taneja stated he expects capex to be flat because it pertains to AI.
July 23 – Throughout Tesla’s Q2 2025 earnings name, Musk stated Dojo 2 was anticipated to be “working at scale” someday in 2026, with “scale being someplace round 100k H100 equal.” In the identical breath, he hinted at attainable redundancies.
“Eager about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it looks as if intuitively, we need to attempt to discover convergence there, the place it’s mainly the identical 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 shut to twenty Dojo employees left to start out their very own firm that builds AI chips, software program, and {hardware} known as DensityAI.
August 7 – Bloomberg reviews that Tesla has disbanded its Dojo workforce and shut down the undertaking. Peter Bannon, Dojo’s lead, left the corporate, as effectively.
Musk responded to the reviews on X, saying: “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its sources and scale two fairly completely different AI chip designs. The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will likely be glorious for inference and no less than fairly good for coaching. All effort is targeted on that.”
August 10 – “As soon as it turned clear that every one paths converged to AI6, I needed to shut down Dojo and make some robust personnel selections, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary useless 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 single board.”
September 1 – Tesla shares its Grasp Plan Half IV on social media platform X. There isn’t a point out of Dojo or Cortex, though AI, and extra particularly, “bodily AI” takes a central position.
This story initially printed August 10, 2024. The ultimate replace of the Tesla Dojo timeline printed September 2, 2025.
