Elon Musk is on a mission to build new supercomputers. As its CEO Tesla and its new artificial intelligence startup xAI, the tech titan has big plans for how AI can help supercharge its businesses.
In January, he wrote to X that Tesla should be thought of as an AI/robotics company rather than a car company. Tesla’s purpose-built supercomputer named Dojo is key to this transformation. Tesla said it plans to spend $500 million to build the supercomputer in Buffalo, New York. Tesla is also building another supercomputer cluster, called Cortex, at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Dojo will process and train artificial intelligence models using the large amounts of video and data captured by Tesla cars. The goal is to improve Tesla’s suite of driver assistance features, which the company calls Autopilot, and its more powerful Full Self-Driving, or FSD, system. Subscriptions to Tesla’s FSD features cost $99 per month and include automatic lane changes, automatic parking, and automatic stop for traffic lights and stop signs.
“They’ve sold what it is, 5 million plus cars. Each of those cars usually has eight plus cameras in them. And if you then consider that these cars are driven, let’s just say 10,000 miles a year on average, ‘We carry all that the video back to Tesla,” says Steven Dickens, chief technology consultant at Futurum Group. “So what can they do with this training set? Obviously they can develop Full Self-Driving and are getting close to it.”
Despite their names, neither Autopilot nor FSD make Tesla vehicles autonomous and require active driver supervision, as Tesla states in website. In the past, the company has drawn scrutiny from regulators who say Tesla falsely advertised the capabilities of its Autopilot and FSD systems. But achieving full autonomy is critical for Tesla, whose high valuation depends heavily on bringing robotaxis to market, some analysts say.
The company reported lackluster results in its latest earnings report and has lagged behind other automakers working on autonomous vehicle technology. These include Alphabet– owned by Waymo, which already operates commercial fully autonomous taxis in several US cities; of GM Cruise and of Amazon Zoox. In China, competitors include; Didi and Baidu.
Tesla hopes that Dojo, which Musk says will be operating for Tesla starting in 2023, will change that. A Tesla robotaxi event originally scheduled for August is now expected to take place in early October.
The Dojo may also be useful for training Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, which the company plans to use in its factories starting next year. Musk said Tesla plans to spend $10 billion this year in AI.
Musk is also betting on supercomputers to run his new AI venture xAI. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to develop large language models and AI products, such as the Grok chatbot, as an alternative to AI tools created by OpenAI. Microsoft and Google.
Despite being one of its founders, Elon Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and has since become one of the company’s fiercest critics. In June, it was announced that xAI would be building a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee to train Grok. In early September, Musk was revealed that a portion of the Memphis supercomputer, called Colossus, was already online.
To learn more about Elon Musk’s supercomputer plans, watch the video.
