Tesla CEO Elon Musk has ordered the shut down of its Dojo supercomputer team, with team leader Peter Bannon departing the company, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Dojo supercomputer was designed around custom training chips to process vast amounts of data and video from Tesla EVs to train the carmaker's autonomous-driving software.
Tesla did not reply to a Reuters request for comment. Musk said on X it didn't make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two different AI chips.
Over the past year, Tesla, during a company-wide restructuring, has seen many executive departures and thousands of job cuts. The company has redirected its focus to AI-driven self-driving technology and robotics, with Musk pursuing an integration strategy across his business empire.
In March, xAI acquired the social media platform X for $33bn (R585.37bn) to bolster its chatbot training capabilities, while Tesla integrated the Grok chatbot into its vehicles.
The carmaker also plans to increase its reliance on external technology partners such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for compute, and Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing, as per the Bloomberg report.
Last month, Samsung secured a $16.5bn (R292.68bn) deal to supply AI chips to Tesla, expected to power self-driving cars, humanoid robots and data centres.
Musk earlier said Samsung's new chip factory in Taylor, Texas would make Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip.
While no timeline was provided for AI6 chip production, Musk has previously said next-generation AI5 chips will be produced at the end of 2026, suggesting AI6 would follow.
"The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that", Musk said in an X post late on Thursday.
Musk also said in a supercomputer cluster it would make sense to put in many AI5/AI6 chips.
"One could call that Dojo 3, I suppose", he said.
The Dojo team recently lost about 20 workers to newly formed DensityAI, and the remaining workers are being reassigned to other data centre and compute projects within Tesla, the Bloomberg report said.
Nvidia declined to comment on the Bloomberg report, while AMD and Samsung did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
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