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Elon Musk is barrelling full steam ahead on Dojo — Tesla's supercomputer project and attempt at competing with AI chip superstar Nvidia.
The Tesla CEO and billionaire addressed Dojo during the company's disappointing second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, doubling down on Tesla's commitment to developing the state-of-the-art system.
Musk acknowledged he is "quite concerned" about Tesla's inability to access the top-tier Nvidia graphics processing units, or GPUs, because of skyrocketing demand for microprocessors within the tech sector.
The chips quickly and efficiently perform difficult calculations to render images and graphics and are key to training and deploying AI.
"I'm incredibly impressed by Nvidia's execution and the capability of their hardware," Musk said Tuesday. "What we are seeing is that the demand for Nvidia hardware is so high that it's often difficult to get the GPUs."
Despite Musk's complaints that Nvidia chips are difficult to come by, the billionaire admitted in June to redirecting $500 million in the AI processors meant for Tesla to X earlier this year, saying the EV maker didn't have the space to turn them on.
On Tuesday, Musk said Tesla must "put a lot more effort" into Dojo to ensure the company has the training capability it needs without having to rely exclusively on Nvidia.
"We do see a path to being competitive with Nvidia with Dojo," Musk said. "We kind of have no choice."
But competing with Nvidia could be easier said than done, given the company's massive head start in the field.
While the tech company has only become a household name in the last year, Nvidia has been working on its signature chips for years. In an interview with NPR earlier this year, Stephen Witt, a writer who profiled Nvidia's CEO for The New Yorker, estimated the company has as much as a 10-year head start on any other chip maker in the industry. According to a June CNBC report, Mizuho Securities estimated that Nvidia controlled 70 to 95% of the market share of chips used for AI.
After the Tuesday earnings call, in which Tesla reported missing its earnings targets, Musk posted photos of Dojo on X, saying it will have roughly "8k H100-equivalent of training online by the end of this year."
"We've really got to make Dojo work," Musk said during the call. "And we will."
Musk has been positioning Tesla as an AI company and has been hyping its Robotaxi; the Robotaxi event has been delayed until October of this year.
