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Elon Musk made another big promise this week during a lackluster earnings report that sent Tesla stock tumbling more than 7% before he logged off the call and didn't recover all week.
The Tesla CEO said the company will "double down" on developing its Dojo supercomputer, in hopes of competing with the chip-producing giant Nvidia.
"We do see a path to being competitive with Nvidia with Dojo," Musk told investors and analysts during Tuesday's call. "And I think we kind of have no choice because the demand for Nvidia is so high, and it's obviously their obligation essentially to raise the price of GPUs to whatever the market will bear, which is very high. So I think we've really got to make Dojo work, and we will."
It's not the first time Musk has made a grandiose promise about what his tech could do without certainty he'd reach his desired outcome — and it's not clear he'll be able to follow through with this one, either.
Musk first mentioned Dojo, the supercomputer designed to improve Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology, in 2019. While the company has invested heavily in the ultra-powerful training computer and associated hardware, analysts agree Dojo doesn't yet compare to Nvidia.
The most bullish investors, like Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, see Tesla as just starting the next chapter in its "growth story" via its investments in AI. Though Musk has big goals for advancement in AI technology, Ives predicted in a recent company report for Tesla that "that vision is on the doorstep."
Nvidia, which was founded in 1993, has market dominance with a $2.78 trillion market cap — and its GPUs are in such high demand (from clients including Musk's Tesla and xAI) that the CEO Jensen Huang has had to assure analysts that the company is allocating them fairly.
Roey Kosover, director of the investment fund FinYX Fund SPC, told Investing.com that shareholders have benefited tremendously from Musk's businesses, but "some of his assertions are not always accurate." Dojo, he estimated, has a capability roughly 10 years behind Nvidia's current power and Nvidia has an "incredible record of continuing to evolve and expand."
"So perhaps his recent claim that Tesla's Dojo would rival Nvidia shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value," Kosover told the outlet, adding: "Where Nvidia is now is not where they will be in the future, if and when Dojo has the capability to do that."
Representatives for Tesla and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
When addressing questions about continued delays to Tesla's Robotaxi project, Musk acknowledged during the Tuesday call that his predictions "have been overly optimistic in the past."
With his various business ventures, Musk has made massive strides in turning EVs into a status symbol, bringing forth innovations in space exploration with his reusable rockets and low Earth orbit satellites with Starlink. But while the billionaire has big dreams to innovate across industries, he's been off with his timeline — when his ideas make it to market at all.
Musk, in 2016, promised Teslas would have fully functional FSD technology within two years. In 2019, he predicted regulatory approval for his still-yet-to-be-revealed Robotaxi project would take about a year. He estimated in 2014 SpaceX would take people to Mars by 2024. The startup that tried to bring Musk's 2013 Hyperloop idea to life shut down last year.
For now, it remains unclear if Musk's planned competition with Nvidia will meet the same fate.
