At a news meeting on Friday, New York’s governor Kathy Hochul said that Tesla will spend $500 million to build one of its “Dojo” supercomputers at its factory in Buffalo. This came just a few days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk called the project a “long shot.”
Hochul’s office says Tesla made its choice based on “New York’s reliable power supply, strong talent pipeline, and availability of usable space for the project.”
Dojo is a supercomputer that was first shown off at Tesla’s “AI Day” event in 2021. Its purpose is to help the company reach its still-unachieved goal of making a self-driving car. Tesla is going to use the supercomputer to handle huge amounts of video data from its electric cars in order to train the AI that runs its most advanced driver assistance software, which the company calls Full Self-Driving Beta. Musk said in 2017 that Tesla would spend “well over $1 billion” on Dojo.
Bringing the Dojo project to Buffalo is the latest change in Tesla’s plans for the area, which has become a bit of a money-grab for New York state. The plant was once called “Gigafactory 2,” and Tesla took it over from SolarCity when it bought the struggling solar panel company in 2016. At that point, the state had already given the plant $750 million. Tesla said they would make Solar Roof tiles there, but it was hard to make enough of them. Panasonic, which was a partner, left the plant in 2020, and Tesla hired people to label training data for its less advanced Autopilot software.
When asked in April of last year, Musk said he thought the Dojo supercomputer project was a “long shot bet” that could “pay off in a very, very big way… in the multi-hundred-billion-dollar level.”
He said it again this week on a call with investors. He said, “It’s not even close to a sure thing. It’s a high-risk, high-reward program.” “We’re making it bigger, and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3, and other things.” That being said, I believe it has promise, but it comes with a high risk and a high reward.
At Hochul’s news conference, the $500 million investment was praised. However, Musk played down the number in a social media post about X, saying that the company would spend much more on Nvidia hardware in 2024.
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It’s true that the governor said it was a Dojo Supercomputer, but Musk wrote in the post on X that $500M, which is a lot of money, is only enough for a $10,000 Nvidia H100 machine. “This year, Tesla will spend more on Nvidia hardware than that.” At this point, it costs at least a few billion dollars a year to be successful in AI.
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