Elon Musk has confirmed that Tesla killed its supercomputer project, Dojo, but his explanation raises eyebrows. The company shut down the program after 20 team members quit to join a new startup, DensityAI.
Last month, Musk said “Dojo 2 is good, but Dojo 3 will be great.” He claimed that Dojo’s platform could surpass NVIDIA’s products, but now suggests that he had to shut it down due to its “evolutionary dead end.”
However, this narrative doesn’t hold up. Musk’s explanation seems to contradict his previous claims about Tesla’s chip design team and the success of Dojo. The departure of key team members, including Peter Bannon, who led custom silicon at Tesla, also raises questions.
Bannon left Tesla amid a talent exodus to join DensityAI, which supports the Bloomberg narrative that critical Dojo team members quit. Using the same chips for training and inference computing also seems suboptimal, given the different data types and requirements for each task.
Musk’s recent pro-Dojo comments appear to be a spin on his story to justify shutting down the project. The true reason behind Dojo’s demise remains unclear, leaving many to wonder about Musk’s intentions.
Source: https://electrek.co/2025/08/11/elon-musk-confirms-killed-tesla-dojo-but-reason-raises-eyebrows