Tesla CEO, Elon Musk told investors on Wednesday that the in-house Dojo supercomputer is being designed to handle massive amounts of data, including video from Tesla cars, needed to create autonomous driving software.
Tesla says it has started production of its Dojo supercomputer to train its fleet of autonomous vehicles.
Tesla supercomputing
Tesla Inc. is sparing no expense to become a player in supercomputing, with Elon Musk saying the electric carmaker plans to invest more than $1 billion on its so-called Project Dojo by the end of 2024.
“We will be spending well over $1 billion on Dojo” over the next year, he said during a conference call with analysts.
In Tesla’s earnings report of the second quarter, 2023, the company outlined “four main technology pillars” needed to “solve vehicle autonomy at scale: extremely large real-world dataset, neural net training, and vehicle hardware and vehicle software.”
“We are developing each of these pillars in-house,” the company said in its report. “This month, we are taking a step towards faster and cheaper neural net training with the start of production of our Dojo training computer.”
Tesla earnings release
The disclosure of that big-ticket expenditure appeared to spook investors, contributing to more than a 4% postmarket slide in share price, as per Tesla earnings release. Zachary Kirkhorn, Tesla’s chief financial officer, was quick to clarify on the call the investment is split between R&D and capital expenditures, and is in line with a previously-stated three-year expense outlook.
Musk said Tesla has a “staggering amount” of video at its disposal, thanks to its customers’ use of camera-based driver assistance software called Autopilot and a related feature known as “Full Self Driving Beta” that has racked up more than 300 million miles of data. As per latest Tesla earnings release it had begun production of its Dojo supercomputer.
For Tesla supercomputing is not new. It already has a large NVIDIA GPU-based supercomputer that is one of the most powerful in the world, but the new Tesla supercomputer Dojo, is custom-built computer and is using chips designed by Tesla.
Tesla supercomputer dojo inception
It was in 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk gave this “super powerful training computer” a name: Dojo.
Previously, Musk has claimed that Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer will be capable of an exaFLOP, or 1 quintillion floating point operations per second. That is an incredible amount of power. “To match what a one exaFLOP computer system can do in just one second, you’d have to perform one calculation every second for 31,688,765,000 years,” Network World wrote.
All about dojo supercomputer
At Tesla’s AI Day in 2021, Dojo supercomputer was still a work in progress. Executives revealed its first chip and training tiles, which would eventually develop into a full Dojo cluster or “exapod.” Tesla said it will combine 2 x 3 tiles in a tray and two trays in a computer cabinet for over 100 petaflops per cabinet. In a 10-cabinet system, Tesla’s supercomputer Dojo exapod will break the barrier of the exaflop of compute.
A year later, at AI Day 2022, Tesla’s supercomputer Dojo’s progress was unveiled, including having a full system tray. At the time, the automaker spoke about having a full cluster by early 2023 though now it looks like it will likely be early 2024.
