Tesla will spend $500 million to build one of its supercomputers called “Dojo” at its factory in Buffalo, New York, on State governor Kathy Hochul said Friday during a press conference just days after CEO Elon Musk called the project a “long shot.”
Tesla's decision was “informed by New York's reliable power supply, its 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 yet-unmet goal of building a self-driving car. Tesla plans to use the supercomputer to process a large amount of video data coming out 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 “more than $1 billion” on Dojo.
Bringing the Dojo project to Buffalo is the latest shift in Tesla's priorities for the location, which has become something like a waste for the state of New York. Once dubbed “Gigafactory 2,” Tesla took over the SolarCity factory when it acquired the troubled solar panel company in 2016. The state had already committed $750 million to the plant at the time. Tesla promised to make solar tiles there, but had difficulty producing the product at scale. His partner, Panasonic, pulled out of the plant in 2020 and Tesla switched to employing people to label training data for its less advanced Autopilot software.
Musk saying Last April, he believed the Dojo supercomputer project was a “long shot” that could “give big results… at the level of several hundred billion dollars.”
He reiterated the point this week in a call with analysts. “It's not a sure thing at all. It's a high-risk, high-reward program,” she said. “We are expanding it and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3 and all that. So, you know, I think it has potential, but the kind of size is high enough to be high risk and high return.”
While the $500 million investment received applause during Hochul's press conference, Musk downplayed the figure in a social media post on X, noting that the company would 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 large sum of money, is only equivalent to a 10,000 Nvidia H100 system,” Musk wrote in the X post. “Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware this year. The stakes to be competitive in ai are at least several billion dollars a year right now.”
