Tesla is disbanding its Dojo supercomputer team, ditching its in-house AI chip project, Bloomberg reports.
Dojo lead Peter Bannon is out. The rest of the team will get shuffled to other Tesla data center and compute roles.
This follows a wave of departures. About 20 former Tesla AI team members left to start a new startup named DensityAI. DensityAI is gearing up to build AI chips, hardware, and software for data centers, robotics, AI agents, and automotive use cases. Founders include ex-Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and former Tesla execs Bill Chang and Ben Floering. 
Tesla CEO Elon Musk had been pushing Tesla as an AI and robotics company, despite a rocky robotaxi rollout in Austin in June. The rollout featured human-supervised Model Ys and a series of driving issues.
Dojo was central to Musk’s AI vision since 2019. He called it key to full self-driving, due to its “ability to process truly vast amounts of video data.” The Dojo project included Tesla’s custom D1 chip and plans for a next-gen D2 chip to solve bottlenecks.
But talk about Dojo mostly stopped by August 2024 when Musk shifted focus to Cortex, Tesla’s “giant new AI training supercluster” based in Austin.
Tesla will now lean more on external partners like Nvidia for GPUs, AMD for compute, and Samsung for chip manufacturing. Last month, Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to produce its AI6 inference chips, designed for everything from FSD to Optimus robots and AI training data centers.
During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, Musk hinted at overlapping tech:
“Thinking about Dojo 3 and the AI6 inference chip, it seems like intuitively, we want to try to find convergence there, where it’s basically the same chip.”
Tesla’s board is offering Musk a $29 billion pay package to keep him focused on Tesla and AI, rather than splitting time with his other ventures, such as the AI startup xAI.
TechCrunch reached out to Tesla for comment.
