Elon Musk is on a mission to build a new supercomputer. as CEO Tesla The tech mogul and his new artificial intelligence startup, xAI, have big plans for how artificial intelligence can help enhance his business.
In January, he wrote on X that Tesla should be considered an AI/robotics company rather than a car company. Tesla’s customized supercomputer Dojo is key to this transformation. Tesla said it plans to spend $500 million to build a supercomputer in Buffalo, New York. Tesla is also building another supercomputer cluster called Cortex at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Dojo will use the vast amounts of footage and data captured by Tesla vehicles to process and train artificial intelligence models. The goal is to improve Tesla’s suite of driver-assistance features (which the company calls “Autopilot”) and its more capable Full Self-Driving, or FSD, system. Tesla’s FSD feature, which costs $99 per month as a subscription, includes automatic lane changing, automatic parking, and automatic parking at traffic lights and stop signs.
“They’ve sold more than 5 million cars. Each car typically has eight cameras in it. If you think about these cars being driven, let’s say an average of 10,000 miles per year,” said Steven, chief technical advisor at Futurum Group. “We are sending all the footage back to Tesla,” said Steven Dickens. “So what can they do with this training set? Clearly they can develop fully autonomous driving, and they’re getting closer to that.”
Despite the name, as Tesla states on its website, neither Autopilot nor FSD enable Tesla vehicles to drive themselves and require active driver supervision. The company has come under scrutiny in the past from regulators, who said Tesla falsely promoted the capabilities of its Autopilot and FSD systems. But some analysts say achieving full autonomy is critical for Tesla, whose sky-high valuation depends largely on bringing robotaxis to market.
The company posted dismal results in its latest earnings report and lags behind other automakers working on self-driving car technology. These include letterWaymo, a subsidiary of Waymo, has commercially operated fully autonomous taxis in many cities in the United States. General Motors cruises and Amazon’s Zukes. In China, competitors include drop and Baidu.
Musk said Dojo has been running tasks for Tesla since 2023, and Tesla hopes Dojo can change the status quo. A Tesla robotaxi event originally scheduled for August is now expected to take place in early October.
Dojo can also be used to train Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, which the company plans to use in its factories starting next year. Musk has said that Tesla plans to invest $10 billion in artificial intelligence this year.
Musk is also betting on supercomputers to run his new artificial intelligence venture, xAI. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to develop large-scale language models and artificial intelligence products, such as its chatbot Grok, as an alternative to the artificial intelligence tools created by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.
Although Elon Musk was one of OpenAI’s founders, he left OpenAI in 2018 and has since become one of the company’s harshest critics. In June, xAI announced it would build a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee, to train Grok. In early September, Musk revealed that part of the Memphis supercomputer Colossus was online.
To learn more about Elon Musk’s supercomputer plans, watch the video.
