Tesla has confirmed a $500 million investment to construct a Dojo supercomputer at its Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York.
The Dojo supercomputer, first unveiled at Tesla’s AI Day in 2021, is an ambitious project aimed at processing extensive video data from Tesla’s fleet of vehicles. This data is crucial for training the AI algorithms that power Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software, a key component in the company’s quest for a fully autonomous driving solution.
Despite recent setbacks, including the departure of key project leaders, the company has announced it will spend $500 million to bring a Dojo supercomputer to Giga New York. The investment was first announced by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul at a press conference on Friday, news which was later confirmed by Musk on X.
Musk also confirmed that in addition to the Dojo project, Tesla is significantly investing in NVIDIA AI processors, with plans to spend more on NVIDIA hardware than the allocated $500 million for the Dojo supercomputer in 2024.
The governor is correct that this is a Dojo Supercomputer, but $500M, while obviously a large sum of money, is only equivalent to a 10k H100 system from Nvidia.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2024
Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware this year. The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at…
Tesla last year announced plans to spend “well over $1 billion on Dojo”, with the goal of it becoming one of the world’s top 5 supercomputers by early 2024. The supercomputer is projected to reach 100 exaflops by later this year. To put it into perspective, an exaflop signifies a supercomputer’s ability to perform at least 10^18, or one quintillion, floating-point operations per second.
After the departure of project lead Ganesh Venkataramanan late last year, former Apple executive and current director Peter Bannon has taken over the reigns.
