Tesla to spend $500M to build its Dojo supercomputer project

Tesla will spend $500 million to build one of its so-called “Dojo” supercomputers at its Buffalo, New York factory. This development comes just days after CEO Elon Musk called the project a “long shot.” Dojo, which was first announced at Tesla’s “AI Day” event in 2021, is a supercomputer meant to help advance the company’s still-unrealized goal of building a self-driving car.

Tesla plans to use the supercomputer to process reams of video data that come off of its electric vehicles in order to train the AI that now powers its most advanced driver assistance software, which it calls Full Self-Driving Beta.

Musk said last year that Tesla plans to spend “well over $1 billion” on Dojo.

Bringing the Dojo project to Buffalo is the latest shift in Tesla’s priorities for the location. 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 point. Tesla promised to make Solar Roof tiles there, but struggled to produce the product at scale. Its partner, Panasonic, pulled out of the plant in 2020. Later Tesla pivoted to employing people 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 could “pay off in a very, very big way… in the multi-hundred-billion-dollar level.”