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Tesla's is aiming to compete with NVIDIA in machine learning through its Dojo supercomputer, according to fresh remarks from Elon Musk. Musk shared the latest bit of details for his firm's AI plans at Tesla's earnings call earlier today after a financial report that missed Wall Street estimates. During the call, he bemoaned the tight supply capacity of NVIDIA's GPUs, which are widely viewed in the industry as the top performers for computing AI workloads.
This has led Musk to conclude that Tesla has no choice but to compete with NVIDIA through its own supercomputer. Tesla's Dojo uses its in house D1 chip, and future variants will use an upgraded D2 chip, which the firm revealed in late 2022, well ahead of the start of the current AI wave.
Tesla Has "No Choice" But To Make Custom AI Chip Work Due To Tight Capacity For NVIDIA's Products, Says Musk
Over the past couple of years, Musk has shared a slew of new products for Tesla, including its manufacturing robot called Optimus and new vehicles. These have pushed its Dojo supercomputer in the background, and today's call saw a Tesla investor ask him about the supercomputer's future. AI is key to Tesla's future since it uses machine learning (a subset of AI technologies) to train its assisted driving platform called Full Self Driving (FSD).
In response, while commending NVIDIA on its "execution and the capability of their hardware," Musk lamented that "the demand for NVIDIA hardware is so high that, uh, it's often difficult to get the GPUs." Musk is concerned "about actually being able to get state of the art NVIDIA GPUs when we want them," which necessitates Tesla to focus more resources on Dojo to "ensure that we've got the training capability that we need."
This forces Tesla to "double down on Dojo" and places it on a path to "being competitive with NVIDIA, with Dojo," he added. Tesla has "no choice because the demand for NVIDIA is so high and the, the, it's, it's obviously their, their obligation essentially to raise the price of GPUs to whatever the market will bear, which is very high," he explained.
Tesla shared the latest technical details for the Dojo supercomputer during its AI event in October 2022. Musk confirmed in June last year that Dojo was online and running useful tasks at Tesla data centers for months. An update shared by Tesla's AI division on X added that Dojo's hardware was production ready in July 2023, and it predicted that Dojo would reach 30 exaflops by February this year. One exaflop of computing equals roughly 300,000 NVIDIA A100 GPUs.
Musk shared more details about Dojo on X earlier today when he outlined that Dojo 1 will have roughly "8k H100-equivalent of training online by end of year." These comments were accompanied by a graph in Tesla's investor deck for its Q2 earnings, which revealed that the firm aims to have AI training capacity roughly equivalent to 90,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs by 2024 end. These H100s are accompanied by roughly 40,000 of Tesla's HW4 AI computers, added Musk.
Dojo pics pic.twitter.com/Lu8YiZXo8c
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2024
About the author: Ramish is a seasoned technology writer and editor with more than a decade of experience. He specializes in semiconductor fabrication and market analysis. With a background in finance and supply chain management - via his bachelors in Finance and a micromasters in supply chain management from MIT - Ramish combines financial rigor with deep industry insight to deliver accurate and authoritative coverage.
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