Tesla is the only car company that designs the inference silicon in its own vehicles, which is the part of its AI programme that has unambiguously worked. Every car it builds carries a custom NPU running vision networks in real time.
Dojo is the more instructive half. Tesla spent years building a bespoke training supercomputer around the D1 chip, then shut it down in August 2025, with Musk describing the architecture as an evolutionary dead end. The team was disbanded and training consolidated onto clustered AI5 and AI6 parts.
A programme called Dojo 3 was announced in January 2026, but it is a different thing wearing the same name — based on a future AI7 chip and framed around space-based compute. Reports that Dojo was simply cancelled, and reports that it was simply revived, are each half the story.