Elon Musk is on a mission to construct new supercomputers. Because the CEO of Tesla and his new synthetic intelligence startup xAI, the tech titan has large plans for a way synthetic intelligence might help to supercharge his companies.

In January, he wrote on X that Tesla must be seen as an AI/robotics firm reasonably than a automobile firm. Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer named Dojo is essential to this transformation. Tesla has stated it plans to spend $500 million to construct the supercomputer in Buffalo, New York. Tesla can be constructing one other supercomputer cluster, referred to as Cortex, on the firm’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Dojo will course of and practice AI fashions utilizing the big quantities of video and knowledge captured by Tesla automobiles. The objective is to enhance Tesla’s suite of driver help options, which the corporate calls Autopilot, and its extra sturdy Full Self-Driving or FSD system. Subscriptions to Tesla’s FSD options value $99 a month and embrace computerized lane adjustments, computerized parking and computerized stopping for visitors lights and cease indicators.

“They’ve bought what’s it, 5 million plus automobiles. Every a type of automobiles usually has eight cameras plus in it. And should you suppose then that these automobiles are driving round, let’s simply say 10,000 miles a 12 months on common, they’re streaming all of that video again to Tesla,” says Steven Dickens, chief expertise advisor on the Futurum Group. “So what can they do with that coaching set? Clearly they’ll develop Full Self-Driving they usually’re getting near that.”

Regardless of their names, neither Autopilot nor FSD make Tesla autos autonomous and require lively driver supervision, as Tesla states on its web site. Prior to now, the corporate has garnered scrutiny from regulators who say that Tesla falsely marketed the capabilities of its Autopilot and FSD programs. However reaching full autonomy is important for Tesla, whose sky-high valuation is basically depending on bringing robotaxis to market, some analysts say.

The corporate reported lackluster leads to its newest earnings report and has fallen behind different automakers engaged on autonomous automobile expertise. These embrace Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already commercially working totally autonomous taxis in a number of U.S. cities, GM’s Cruise and Amazon’s Zoox. In China, opponents embrace Didi and Baidu.

Tesla hopes Dojo, which Musk says has been operating duties for Tesla since 2023, will change that. A Tesla robotaxi occasion initially scheduled for August is now anticipated to happen in early October.

Dojo may also be helpful for coaching Tesla’s humanoid robotic, Optimus, which the corporate plans to make use of in its factories beginning subsequent 12 months. Musk has stated that Tesla plans to spend $10 billion this 12 months on AI.

Musk can be betting on supercomputers to run his new AI enterprise xAI. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to develop giant language fashions and AI merchandise, like its chatbot Grok, as an alternative choice to AI instruments created by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

Regardless of being considered one of its founders, Elon Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and has since change into one of many firm’s harshest critics. In June, it was introduced that xAI would construct a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee to coach Grok. In early September, Musk revealed {that a} portion of the Memphis supercomputer, referred to as Colossus, was already on-line.

To study extra about Elon Musk’s supercomputer plans, watch the video.