Gabriel Walker
Jan 29, 2024
Tesla, the Elon Musk-owned leading EV maker will spend $500 million to design a supercomputer at its production facility in Buffalo, New York.
Coming days after the Tesla boss called this project a "long shot", the announcement of the disbursement of funds was made by Kathy Hochul, the state’s governor while addressing a press conference. Meanwhile, the supercomputer is named "Dojo" by the company. Musk last year announced to spend "well over $1 billion” on the project.
According to the state governor's office, the EV manufacturer's decision was “informed by New York’s reliable power supply, strong talent pipeline and availability of usable space for the project.”
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First announced at Tesla's "AI Day" event in 2021, the supercomputer will be designed to bring about the company's core objective to manufacture a fully autonomous car, as reported by Tech Crunch.
Reflecting on his ambitious sight for Dojo, Musk last year in April said the project was a “long shot bet” that could “pay off in a very, very big way… in the multi-hundred-billion-dollar level.”
To train the AI technology powering its most upgraded driver assistance software, called Full Self-Driving Beta, the company aims to utilise the computer to render a huge amount of video data that comes off of its EVs.
“It’s not, like, a sure thing at all, It’s a high-risk, high-payoff program,” he said. “We are scaling it up, and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3, and whatnot. So, you know, I think it’s got potential, but the kind of size enough high risk, high payoff,” Musk told industry analysts this week while recalling on the prospects he's eyeing out of this project.
While the $500m churn out brought a heap of cheers and applause during the press conference, Musk made it seem trivial in a social media post on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that the company would spend much more on Nvidia hardware in 2024.
