Tesla discreetly erases one of her most ambitious projects

The story of Dojo starts in 2019, but it was during AI Day 2021, with Elon Musk as master of ceremonies, that Tesla formalizes her “house supercomputer” with great fanfare. Designed around tailor -engraved “D1” “D1” chips, Dojo had to ingest the images captured by millions of brand vehicles, to transform them into a brain capable of surpassing everything that Nvidia then proposed.

From the initial promise, there is not much left in August 2025. Bloomberg announced on August 7 that the Tesla’s Dojo team was dissolved, which Elon Musk did not denote on X (ex-Twitter), a fairly rare fact. It was ” a risky bet »: Elon Musk whispered it several times when the project was starting to skate and investors wanted to know the progress. However, he has always maintained the promise with his usual sleight of hand. As soon as last July, at the Tesla’s second quarter of the second quarter of the second quarter, he spoke as if everything advanced as planned … or almost.

Too ambitious promises from Tesla?

The initial promises around Dojo were spectacular: a real technological rupture transforming Tesla into a world leader in AI, in particular applied to autonomous driving, then later adding the Robotaxis and humanoid robots to the list.

From 2021, Elon Musk promised that Dojo would be ” The best training supercomputer in the world “, Aiming 100 exaflops by the end of 2024. He intended to double the projects of giants like Nvidia. This announcement by AI Day had also inflated the valuation of the company.

According to the initial plans, Tesla had to get rid of the Nvidia chips (GPU) by creating its own chip, called “D1”. It was particularly ambitious, because all of this requires an expertise that Tesla had to acquire by hiring qualified personnel and by devoting substantial resources to them. It was therefore a subject regularly discussed during financial conferences, investors wishing to know when the company could benefit from a real return on investment on this promising technology.

The height is that the American manufacturer has probably inspired some of its competitors to follow the same path. But, where Tesla buried her own chips, Chinese manufacturers confirm their development and integration to no longer depend on Nvidia and others. Nevertheless, if Tesla tries to make people forget some of its promises, the brand has not retroped over everything.

2024: Place in Cortex, the discreet plan B

As often when Tesla wants to add a new corpse in the closet, the company stops talking about it as much as possible. This is what could be arriving at the Cybertruck right now. Instead of Dojo, the name of Cortex appears, for a project that seems to have a little the same objective.

In 2024, Tesla discreetly launched Cortex, a project much less flamboyant, but much more pragmatic. It is a built -up supercomputer in Austin Gigafactory and using external technologies and chips like NVIDIA, AMD, Samsung. Clearly, everything that Dojo had to replace with controlled vertical integration.

Officially, Cortex would not take Dojo. Unofficially, it was already the end of the real dojo: IA training passed through Cortex 2.0 for FSD autonomous driving, supporting the arrival of Robotaxi, and helping the industrialization of the Optimus robot, in addition to serving as a calculation platform for all Tesla innovations in terms of AI.

August 2025: Curtain on Dojo

Bloomberg dropped the news on August 7: Tesla dissolves the Dojo team and Peter Bannon – the third and last manager of Dojo since 2023 – will leave the company. Before him, around twenty service employees had already left Tesla to join Densityai, a direct competitor founded by Ganesh Venkataramanan – former Director of Dojo – and other Tesla employees.

Those who remain will be reassigned to other projects. Not a word of Elon Musk on massive departures. However, such a talent flight is certainly not unrelated to its management. Tesla’s boss, he would tend to find another explanation for closing the service: ” It is not logical for Tesla to divide its resources and develop two very different AI chip conceptions “He says on X (ex-Twitter), now speaking of Dojo 3 … which is nothing other than rebadgé Cortex.

The eternal Musk Show

All this is still a skillful way of not saying: ” We failed on house integration. Elon Musk was questioned about the evolution of Dojo during the financial conference of July, when he had avoided approaching the subject of himself. The answer is interesting. Without expanding too much on the subject, he approached the notion of Dojo 2: ” We plan that Dojo 2 will operate on a large scale during next year. He also already approaches Dojo 3 with the AI 6 chips.

However, nothing about this had been presented to investors before. The last Update on Dojo dates back a year earlier (when presenting the results of the second quarter 2024), when Musk complained about the too fluctuating availability of NVIDIA GPUs, therefore preferring the flea developed internally. Elon Musk has not ceased to praise the internal design of his chips and the IA software for a good part of the year 2024.

Apparently, Tesla’s 180 ° turn was somewhat overlooked. Even if scraps of information has been formalized, nothing is really clear in this case, unless you are extremely sharp on the subject. As if everything seemed to be made to maintain a smoke screen on the details of this activity. Not the kind of house? A little, anyway.

It will still be to see if Cortex, or rather Dojo 2 (then Dojo 3), will make you forget the real objective of the Dojo project. How long will it take for investors to realize that Elon Musk has not played cards on the table? Tesla progresses on AI and autonomous conduct, but once again, the initial discourse was very far from reality.

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