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Tesla Disbands Dojo Team
Market Once Had High Hopes for Dojo Project
Relying on External Partners to Strengthen AI Layout
According to a report by Bloomberg, Peter Bannon, the head of the Dojo project, will leave the company, while the remaining team members will be reassigned to other data centers and computing projects at Tesla. The report cited anonymous sources indicating that the conclusion of the Dojo project closely followed the departure of around 20 employees, who went on to found a startup named DensityAI. This company was established by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan along with ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering. The company is set to make its public debut and will focus on creating the chips, hardware, and software needed for AI data centers, with applications in robotics, AI agents, and automotive artificial intelligence.
Market Once Had High Hopes for Dojo Project
The termination of Dojo represents a significant shift in the AI strategy that Musk has consistently emphasized since 2019. Musk had once stated that Dojo would become the cornerstone for Tesla’s realization of fully autonomous driving, as it could “handle vast amounts of video data.” Even during the Q2 earnings call in 2025, he briefly mentioned Dojo. Wall Street had high expectations for this project. In 2023, Morgan Stanley predicted that Dojo would bring Tesla a potential market value of $500 billion from new revenue sources such as robotaxi and software subscriptions. Musk had also stated last year that the AI team would “double down” on the Dojo project.
Relying on External Partners to Strengthen AI Layout
However, since August 2024, Dojo has almost disappeared from Musk’s public discourse. He has shifted to promoting a super AI training cluster named Cortex, which is being built at Tesla’s headquarters in Austin and is intended to address the so-called “real-world AI problems.” Dojo was originally intended to combine self-developed chips with supercomputer computing capabilities. Tesla introduced the D1 chip during its AI Day in 2021, presented by Venkataramanan, who stated that it would work alongside Nvidia GPUs to power the Dojo supercomputer. The company also mentioned that it was developing a next-generation D2 chip to address bottlenecks in data flow from the previous generation.
With the disbandment of Dojo, Tesla will increase its reliance on external technology partners. Bloomberg’s report indicated that Tesla will expand its collaboration with Nvidia and AMD, and has signed a chip manufacturing contract with Samsung worth up to $16.5 billion to mass-produce a chip named AI6. This chip is designed to span FSD (Full Self-Driving), the Optimus robot, and data centers used for AI training.