Elon Musk doesn’t need Tesla to be simply an automaker. He needs Tesla to be an AI firm, one which’s found out tips on how 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 absolutely self-driving; it could possibly carry out some automated driving duties, however nonetheless requires an attentive human behind the wheel. However Tesla thinks with extra knowledge, extra compute energy and extra coaching, it could possibly 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 in regards to the supercomputer all through 2024. However Dojo is now out, and one other supercomputer referred to as Cortex has entered the chat.
Beneath is a timeline of Dojo mentions and guarantees. Try this explainer on what Dojo for much more info 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 group 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 are designed particularly for neural networks and self-driving automobiles.
In the course of the occasion, Musk teases Dojo, revealing that it’s a supercomputer for coaching AI. He additionally notes that each one Tesla automobiles being produced on the time would have all {hardware} essential 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 linked automobiles 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 knowledge & effectively run hyperspace arrays with an enormous 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 pc referred to as Dojo “to course of really huge quantities of video knowledge,” calling it “a beast.” He additionally says the primary model of Dojo is “a couple of yr away,” which might put its launch date someplace round August 2021.
December 31 – Elon says Dojo isn’t wanted, however it’ll make self-driving higher. “It isn’t sufficient to be safer than human drivers, Autopilot finally must be greater than 10 instances safer than human drivers.”
2021
Tesla makes Dojo official
August 19 – The automaker formally pronounces Dojo at Tesla’s first AI Day, an occasion meant to draw engineers to Tesla’s AI group. Tesla additionally introduces its D1 chip, which the automaker says it’ll 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 Know-how whitepaper, “a information to Tesla’s configurable floating level codecs & arithmetic.” The whitepaper outlines a technical normal for a brand new sort of binary floating-point arithmetic that’s utilized in deep studying neural networks and could 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 guess‘
April 19 – Musk tells traders 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 develop into a sellable service that we might supply to different firms in the identical means that Amazon Internet Providers presents internet providers.”
Musk additionally notes that he’d “take a look at Dojo as sort of a long-shot guess,” however a “guess price 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 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 knowledge facilities.
The corporate additionally tasks that Tesla’s compute would be the high 5 in all the world by round February 2024 (there aren’t 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 via 2024.
September 6 – Musk posts on X that Tesla is restricted by AI coaching compute, however that Nvidia and Dojo will repair that. He says managing the information 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 venture. 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 Know-how Symposium, the corporate says Dojo’s next-generation coaching tile — the D2, which places all the Dojo tile onto a single silicon wafer, somewhat than connecting 25 chips to make one tile — is already in manufacturing, in keeping with IEEE Spectrum.
Could 20 – Musk notes that the rear portion of the Giga Texas manufacturing facility extension will embody the development of “a brilliant dense, water-cooled supercomputer cluster.”
June 4 – A CNBC report reveals Musk diverted hundreds 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, because of the continued development 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 inner, primarily the Tesla-designed AI inference pc and sensors current in all of our automobiles, plus Dojo. For constructing the AI coaching superclusters, NVidia {hardware} is about 2/3 of the fee. My present finest guess for Nvidia purchases by Tesla are $3B to $4B this yr.”
July 1 – Musk reveals on X that present Tesla automobiles could not have the correct {hardware} for the corporate’s next-gen AI mannequin. He says that the roughly 5x enhance in parameter rely with the next-gen AI “may be very tough to realize with out upgrading the automobile inference pc.”
Nvidia provide challenges
July 23 – Throughout Tesla’s second-quarter earnings name, Musk says demand for Nvidia {hardware} is “so excessive that it’s usually tough to get the GPUs.”
“I believe this subsequently requires that we put much more effort on Dojo with the intention to be certain that we’ve received the coaching functionality that we’d like,” 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 stainless-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 publish from somebody claiming to start out a membership of “Tesla HW4/AI4 house owners offended 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 group 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 because of 4.2x enhance in knowledge, increased decision video inputs … amongst different enhancements,” in keeping with the letter.
In the course of the name, CFO Vaibhav Taneja famous that Tesla accelerated the buildout of Cortex to hurry up the rollout of FSD V13. He stated that gathered 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.
“Enthusiastic about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it looks as if intuitively, we wish to attempt to discover convergence there, the place it’s principally 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 guess on a chip design that may scale from powering FSD and Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots to high-performance AI coaching in knowledge facilities.
August 6 – Bloomberg studies that shut to twenty Dojo staff left to start out their very own firm that builds AI chips, software program, and {hardware} referred to as DensityAI.
August 7 – Bloomberg studies that Tesla has disbanded its Dojo group and shut down the venture. Peter Bannon, Dojo’s lead, left the corporate, as properly.
Musk responded to the studies on X, saying: “It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its assets and scale two fairly totally different AI chip designs. The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips might be glorious for inference and no less than fairly good for coaching. All effort is concentrated on that.”
August 10 – “As soon as it turned clear that each 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 numerous 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 function.
This story initially revealed August 10, 2024. The ultimate replace of the Tesla Dojo timeline revealed September 2, 2025.
