Tesla New York Gets Dojo Supercomputer
Tesla is reportedly making a $500 million investment to build an enormous Dojo supercomputer cluster at their Gigafactory in Buffalo, NewYork to help power their Full Self-Driving Beta software - despite the loss of a couple of notable leaders of the project last month.
New York State Governor Kathy Hochul announced the investment on Jan 26th, which was confirmed later that same day by CEO Elon Musk on X.
Governor Hochul said that the new supercomputer installation would “Process millions of terabytes of data for FSD” - which is what prompted Elon to make a small correction in his social media post.
Musk is being careful here to note that the new Dojo hardware wouldn’t be much more than a similar Nvidia system that Tesla currently uses to run their AI cluster - and will apparently be buying more of this year, along with some AMD chips to compensate for the slower rollout of the company’s proprietary Dojo systems.
This particular supercomputer setup will likely be used to sort data for Tesla’s Full Self Driving software, just as Governor Hochul said - and will be installed in the New York Gigafactory, which primarily makes the company’s solar products - like solar roof tiles.
Past events like the Investor Day presentation in March last year have shown that Tesla’s work with their Full Self Driving system is being done in tandem with their development of the Dojo Supercomputer. The new FSD system - which began rolling out in mid January - is a learning system, using video from Tesla vehicles to train the system on how to handle road conditions - rather than using hard coding.
The Dojo supercomputer is a big piece of this puzzle - able to sort through and train this learning algorithm quickly via simulations, before sending it back out across the network to Tesla vehicles.
The new Dojo installation means more jobs for FSD technicians, as well as better support for local beta testers - even though Tesla seems to be more careful with hyping the new computer hardware than they were.
For those of us who watched the unveiling event at AI Day in 2021, it seemed like Tesla was ready to make a run at removing all of their older Nvidia hardware. The system’s ability to train machine learning algorithms using much less physical space was a big selling point at the time.
And to be fair, the company has slowly been adding to their Dojo cluster in Palo Alto, California for most of 2023 - but it seems like all is not entirely well in the Dojo team, as Project lead Ganesh Venkataramanan quietly left the company in December - leaving Tesla’s Executive Director Peter Bannon in charge.
This might be what prompted Elon to describe Dojo as a “long shot” during the earnings call just days before the New York Governor’s announcement - but we can’t be certain.
What we can say is that Dojo has been suffering from numerous delays, and while the first Dojo cluster came online last summer - and this new investment will start a new cluster on the East Coast - it seems like development will continue to be a little slow.