Tesla will spend $500 million to construct one in all its so-called “Dojo” supercomputers at its Buffalo, Latest York factory, the state’s governor Kathy Hochul said Friday during a news conference just days after CEO Elon Musk called the project a “long shot.”
Tesla’s decision was “informed by Latest York’s reliable power supply, strong talent pipeline and availability of usable space for the project,” in accordance with Hochul’s office.
Dojo, which was first announced at Tesla’s “AI Day” event in 2021, is a supercomputer meant to assist advance the corporate’s still-unrealized goal of constructing a self-driving automotive. Tesla plans to make use of the supercomputer to process reams of video data that come off of its electric vehicles with the intention to train the AI that now powers its most advanced driver assistance software, which it calls Full Self-Driving Beta. Musk said last 12 months that Tesla plans to spend “well over $1 billion” on Dojo.
Bringing the Dojo project to Buffalo is the newest shift in Tesla’s priorities for the placement, which has became something of a boondoggle for Latest York state. Once dubbed “Gigafactory 2,” Tesla took over the factory from SolarCity when it acquired the troubled solar panel company in 2016. The state had already committed $750 million to the plant by that time. Tesla promised to make Solar Roof tiles there, but struggled to supply the product at scale. Its partner, Panasonic, pulled out of the plant in 2020, and Tesla pivoted to employing individuals who labeled training data for its less-advanced Autopilot software.
Musk said last April that he believed the Dojo supercomputer project was a “long shot bet” that would “repay in a really, very big way… within the multi-hundred-billion-dollar level.”
He reiterated the purpose this week on a call with analysts. “It’s not, like, a sure thing in any respect, It’s a high-risk, high-payoff program,” he said. “We’re scaling it up, and we now have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3, and whatnot. So, you understand, I feel it’s got potential, however the form of size enough high risk, high payoff.”
While the $500 million investment received cheers during Hochul’s press conference, Musk downplayed the figure in a social media post on X, noting the corporate would spend far extra money on Nvidia hardware in 2024.
“The governor is correct that it is a Dojo Supercomputer, but $500M, while obviously a big sum of cash, is simply reminiscent of a 10k H100 system from Nvidia,” Musk wrote within the post on X. “Tesla will spend greater than that on Nvidia hardware this 12 months. The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at the very least several billion dollars per 12 months at this point.”