For years, Elon Musk has spoken of the promise of Dojo, the AI supercomputer that was supposed to be the cornerstone of Tesla’s AI ambitions. It was important enough to Musk that in July 2024, he said the company’s AI team would “double down” on Dojo in the lead-up to Tesla’s robotaxi reveal, which happened in October.
After six years of hype, Tesla decided last month to shut down Dojo and disband the team behind the supercomputer in August 2025. Within weeks of projecting that Dojo 2, Tesla’s second supercluster that was meant to be built on the company’s in-house D2 chips, would reach scale by 2026, Musk reversed course, declaring it “an evolutionary dead end.”
This article originally set out to explain what Dojo was and how it could help Tesla achieve full-self driving, autonomous humanoid robots, semiconductor autonomy, and more. Now, you can think of it more as an obituary of a project that convinced so many analysts and investors that Tesla wasn’t just an automaker, it was an AI company.
Dojo was Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer that was designed to train its “Full Self-Driving” neural networks.
Beefing up Dojo went hand-in-hand with Tesla’s goal to reach full self-driving and bring a robotaxi to market. FSD (Supervised) is Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system that’s on hundreds of thousands of Tesla vehicles today and can perform some automated driving tasks, but it still requires a human to be attentive behind the wheel. It’s also the basis of similar technology powering Tesla’s limited robotaxi service that the company launched in Austin this June using Model Y SUVs.
Even as Dojo’s raison d’être started to come to life, Tesla failed to attribute its self-driving successes — controversial as they were — to the supercomputer. In fact, Musk and Tesla had barely mentioned Dojo at all over the past year. In August 2024, Tesla began promoting Cortex, the company’s “giant new AI training supercluster being built at Tesla HQ in Austin to solve real-world AI,” which Musk has said would have “massive storage for video training of FSD and Optimus.”
In Tesla’s Q4 2024 shareholder deck, the company shared updates on Cortex, but nothing on Dojo. It’s not clear whether Tesla’s Dojo shutdown affects Cortex.
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The response to Dojo’s disbanding has been mixed. Some see it as another example of Musk making promises he can’t deliver on that comes at a time of falling EV sales and a lackluster robotaxi rollout. Others say the shutdown wasn’t a failure, but a strategic pivot from a high-risk, self-reliant hardware to a streamlined path that relies on partners for chip development.
Dojo’s story reveals what was on the line, where the project fell short, and what its shutdown signals for Tesla’s future.
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