Anant Nivarti has rejoined Tesla as its silicon engineering lead.

Nivarti left the automotive firm in December to "build silicon from first principles for scalable AI hardware," at an early-stage stealth startup.

On X, Nivarti said: "Back to building the chips that push the boundaries of AI and autonomy. Real engineering happens at Tesla. Excited for what’s ahead #AI6 #DOJO3."

Nivarti spent eight years as the director/principal of engineering at Tesla working on Dojo AI/ML hardware. Dojo was Tesla's own in-house silicon and supercomputing effort that Morgan Stanley once claimed could "add up to $500 billion to Tesla's enterprise value."

A custom-built system for processing videos from Tesla cars and training its autonomous fleet ambitions, Dojo was ended last year as the company built out an Nvidia GPU data center fleet.

The company also signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung in 2025 for its forthcoming AI6 chip, which provides in-car inference to power its Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistant technology.

"It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs," CEO Elon Musk said last year, after around 20 Dojo employees left for DensityAI, a startup headed by Ganesh Venkataramanan, who previously oversaw the Dojo supercomputer and D1 chip before leaving in 2023.

Dojo’s lead, Peter Bannon, also left the company last year.

Musk continued: "The Tesla AI5, AI6, and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that."

In August, he said: "Once it became clear that all paths converged to AI6, I had to shut down Dojo and make some tough personnel choices, as Dojo 2 was now an evolutionary dead end.

"Dojo 3 arguably lives on in the form of a large number of AI6 SoCs on a single board."

Some six months on, Dojo has returned. Dojo 3 appears to be its own chip line once again, distinct from AI6. This time, the D3 chip is targeted for space data centers.

SpaceX, a separate Musk company preparing for IPO, claims plans to launch up to a million orbital data centers in the coming years.

As part of that, SpaceX, xAI (another Musk business that merged into SpaceX), and Tesla are all working together on TeraFab. This, the companies claim, will be a $20bn factory to build the AI16 and D3 chips for cars, robots, and space.

“We either build the TeraFab, or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the TeraFab," Musk said. The exec has no experience in the famously complex and capital-intensive semiconductor manufacturing industry, and a long history of making big promises about his companies that don’t come to fruition.

No timeline was provided for when TeraFab would be operational. TSMC manufactured the AI5 chip and Dojo line, while Samsung is building AI6 as part of an eight-year deal.

DCD reported exclusively in July 2025 that another of Musk’s companies, AI lab xAI, was hiring staff to develop custom silicon.