Tesla to build Dojo supercomputer at NY gigafactory, Elon Musk confirms

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Tesla is building a Dojo supercomputer at its New York Gigafactory to train its AI systems for autonomous driving and other applications. The project will cost $500 million and create hundreds of jobs in the region.

Tesla is gearing up to build its next-generation Dojo supercomputer at its Gigafactory in Buffalo, New York, as part of a $500 million investment announced by the state’s governor on Friday.

The Dojo supercomputer is designed to process massive amounts of data from Tesla’s vehicles and train its artificial intelligence (AI) systems for autonomous driving and other applications. It is expected to be one of the most powerful computing clusters in the world, surpassing the current leader, NVIDIA.

New York Governor, Kathy Hochul revealed the news during a hearing on the state’s economic development, saying that Tesla’s project would create hundreds of jobs and boost the region’s innovation ecosystem. She also said that the state would support a separate AI supercomputer project at the State University of New York (SUNY) with $275 million in funding and over $400 million in public and private investment.

“I’m also proud to announce that Tesla is investing $500 million to build their next supercomputer right here in Buffalo,” Hochul said, according to WGRZ.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed the plans on X. Still; he also clarified that the $500 million figure was only for a smaller system based on NVIDIA’s chips and that the cost of the Dojo supercomputer would be much higher. He said the “table stakes” for being competitive in AI were “at least several billion dollars per year.”

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.

Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware this year. The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2024
Tesla’s New York Gigafactory currently produces solar panels, solar roofs, and Supercharger components and hosts a team of Autopilot data analysts. Hochul did not provide a timeline for the installation of the Dojo supercomputer. Still, she said it would be a game-changer for the state’s AI industry, expected to grow from $150 billion to $1.3 trillion in the next few years.

The announcement came after Tesla’s Dojo project lead, Ganesh Venkataramanan, left the company last month. Musk said in June that Dojo had already been “online and running useful tasks for a few months.”

As reported earlier, Morgan Stanley analysts said that Tesla had developed an advanced supercomputing architecture that “pushes new boundaries in custom silicon and may put Tesla at an asymmetric advantage in a $10trn TAM.”

Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer will use its AI ASIC chips, which are reportedly more efficient and powerful than NVIDIA’s A100 GPU boxes. Tesla has been using NVIDIA’s chips for its existing supercomputer, which is believed to have over 10,000 units. However, NVIDIA’s chips are facing a global shortage and soaring demand, which may have prompted Tesla to develop its solution.

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