Tech Desk 
Aug 09, 2025
In a major reorganisation, Tesla fired its internal Dojo supercomputer team and fired team leader Peter Bannon.
According to Bloomberg, Tesla has decided to become more dependent on outside technology partners, which represents a significant change in the company's artificial intelligence approach.
In order to train its autonomous-driving software, the Dojo supercomputer was first built to handle enormous volumes of data and video from Tesla's electric vehicles.
The company's CEO Elon Musk, has now chosen to concentrate on creating inference chips, like the Tesla AI5 and AI6, which will be "at least pretty good for training" and excellent for inference.
Research and development of Tesla's AI chips should be streamlined as a result of this action.
"It doesn't make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs," Musk said in his explanation of the decision.
He went on to say that the company's AI efforts will primarily concentrate on the Tesla AI5, AI6, and later chips.
Tesla intends to collaborate with outside chip makers, such as Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing and Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for computing resources.
Samsung signed a $16.5 billion contract last month to supply Tesla with AI chips, which will power data centres, humanoid robots, and self-driving cars.
The next-generation AI5 chips will begin production by the end of 2026, according to Musk's earlier statements.
This change in approach highlights Tesla's attempts to cut expenses and maximise its AI development.
Even though the business has encountered difficulties, such as dwindling EV sales and attempts to expand its robotaxi service, the decision to fire the Dojo team is viewed as a practical move to bring Tesla into compliance with industry standards.
It is anticipated that the move will free Tesla from the operational burden of maintaining a proprietary chip programme, allowing it to scale its AI capabilities more effectively.
The Dojo team recently lost roughly 20 employees to DensityAI, a recently established startup. The remaining employees are being moved to other compute and data centre projects at Tesla.
This action is a component of a larger restructuring initiative at Tesla, which has resulted in thousands of job losses and several executive departures.
