Elon Musk has announced Tesla is officially reviving Dojo, just months after pulling the plug on its in-house supercomputer program. The program’s return is thanks to the AI5 chip design, which is now “in good shape,” according to Musk, allowing the company to begin work on Dojo 3 after calling Dojo’s second generation an “evolutionary dead end.”
“Now that the AI5 chip design is in good shape, Tesla will restart work on Dojo3,” Musk wrote on X, while launching a new hiring push for engineers to help build what he described as “the highest volume chips in the world.”
The decision ties directly to Tesla’s in-house silicon roadmap. Musk revealed last week that the AI5 design is “almost done,” with AI6 already in early development, and the company is now aligning Dojo3 around that new hardware. Rather than relying solely on off-the-shelf GPUs from Nvidia, Tesla wants its own purpose-built supercomputer to train the neural networks that power Full Self-Driving (FSD), as well as Optimus and other future robotics and autonomy products.
Dojo was first unveiled at Tesla’s 2021 AI Day as a custom supercomputer designed to train massive video-based neural networks using Tesla’s proprietary D1 chips. At its peak, the project was seen as central to Tesla’s long-term autonomy strategy. But by August 2025, Tesla had shut it down, reassigned the team, and leaned more heavily on external partners like Nvidia, AMD, and Samsung, while shifting focus to a new AI training cluster known internally as Cortex.
Now, with AI5 nearing completion, Musk appears ready to bring Dojo back — this time as Dojo3 — and build it around Tesla’s latest chip.
As part of the announcement, Musk is also recruiting engineers to make Dojo 3 a reality, inviting applicants to email Tesla with “3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved” to help build what he calls the world’s highest-volume AI chips.
