Tesla will spend $500 million to build one of its supercomputers called “Dojo” at its factory in Buffalo, New York. Governor of the state Kathy Hochul said Friday during a press conference just days after CEO Elon Musk described the project as a “long shot.”
Tesla’s decision was made “due to New York’s reliable power supply, strong talent pipeline and the availability of usable space for the project,” according to Hochul’s office.
Dojo, which was first announced at Tesla’s “AI Day” event in 2021, is a supercomputer intended to help advance the company’s as-yet-unfulfilled goal of building a self-driving car. Tesla plans to use the supercomputer to process troves of video data coming out of its electric cars in order to train the artificial intelligence that now powers its more advanced driver-assistance software, which it calls Full Self-Driving Beta. Musk said last year Tesla plans to spend “well over $1 billion” on the Dojo.
Bringing the Dojo project to Buffalo is the latest shift in priorities for Tesla regarding location, which it has turned into Something from a boondoggle For New York State. Tesla, once dubbed “Gigafactory 2,” took over the factory from SolarCity when it took over the struggling solar panel company in 2016. The state had already committed $750 million to the factory by that point. Tesla promised to manufacture solar roof tiles there, but has struggled to produce the product on a large scale. Its partner Panasonic pulled out of the factory in 2020, and Tesla focused on hiring people who annotated training data for its less advanced Autopilot software.
musk He said Last April, he said he believed the Dojo supercomputer project was a “long-term bet” that could “pay off in a very, very big way…at the multi-hundred billion dollar level.”
He reiterated that point this week on a call with analysts. “It’s never a sure thing, it’s a high-risk, high-reward program,” he said. “We’re scaling it up, and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3, etc. So, you know, I think it has potential, but that kind of scale comes with high enough risks and high rewards.
While the $500 million investment received cheers during Hochul’s press conference, Musk downplayed the number in a social media post on X, noting that the company will spend more money on Nvidia hardware in 2024.
“The governor is right that this is a Dojo Supercomputer, but $500 million, although a lot of money, is only equivalent to a 10k H100 system from Nvidia,” Musk wrote in the post on X. That’s on Nvidia devices this year. The bet on AI competitiveness is at least several billion dollars a year at this point.