Tesla will spend $500 million to build one of its so-called “Dojo” supercomputers at its factory in Buffalo, New York. governor of the state Kathy Hotchul said Friday during a press conference days after CEO Elon Musk called the project a “long shot.”
Tesla’s decision was “informed by New York’s reliable power supply, strong talent pipeline and the availability of usable space for the project,” according to Hochul’s office.
First announced at Tesla’s 2021 “AI Day” event, Dojo is a supercomputer intended to help advance the company’s unrealized goal of building a self-driving car. Tesla plans to use the supercomputer to process bundles of video data from its electric vehicles in order to train the artificial intelligence 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.
Moving the Dojo project to Buffalo is the latest shift in Tesla’s priorities for the location, which has turned into something like a fool for New York State. Once called “Gigafactory 2,” Tesla took over the factory from SolarCity when it bought the troubled 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 at scale. Its partner, Panasonic, left the factory in 2020, and Tesla turned to hiring people who tagged training data for its less advanced Autopilot software.
Musk he said Last April 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 the point this week on a call with analysts. “It’s not at all certain, it’s a high-risk, high-reward scheme,” he said. “We’re scaling it and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3 and everything else. Well, you know, I think it has potential, but the kind of size is pretty high risk, high reward.”
While the $500 million investment received cheers during Hochul’s press conference, Musk downplayed the amount in a social media post on X, noting that the company will spend much more money on Nvidia hardware in 2024.
“The governor is right that this is a Dojo supercomputer, but $500 million, while obviously a lot of money, is only equivalent to a 10k H100 system from Nvidia,” Musk wrote in the post on X. “Tesla will spend more of that in Nvidia hardware this year. The table stakes for AI competitiveness are at least several billion dollars a year at this point.”
