Tesla Dojo: the rise and fall of Elon Musk’s AI supercomputer

Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer, once heralded by Elon Musk as a cornerstone of the company’s AI ambitions, has been officially shut down as of August 2025. Originally designed to train Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) neural networks and support autonomous vehicle and humanoid robot development, Dojo was central to Musk’s vision of Tesla as more than just an automaker. Despite years of hype and investment, the project was abruptly ended after Tesla decided that its second-generation Dojo 2 supercluster, based on in-house D2 chips, was “an evolutionary dead end.” This decision came shortly after Tesla signed a deal to source next-generation AI6 chips from Samsung, signaling a strategic pivot away from self-reliant hardware development toward leveraging external partners for chip design. The shutdown also involved disbanding the Dojo team and the departure of key personnel, including project lead Peter Bannon and about 20 employees who left to start their own AI chip company, DensityAI