Tesla’s senior director of autopilot and project lead for the company’s Dojo supercomputer, Ganesh Venkataramanan, has left the organization.
Previously at AMD, Venkataramanan worked at Tesla for five years and oversaw the Dojo supercomputer, built by the company to process the huge swathes of data generated by Tesla cars to help train AI models for its autonomous driving software.
Director of Tesla Motors and former Apple executive Peter Bannon is now heading up the project, Bloomberg reports.
Dojo is the name for multiple Tesla supercomputers that use the company's custom D1-chips, designed by Venkataramanan's team and manufactured by TSMC.
The company first detailed Dojo in 2021, and installed the initial system in 2022. That version of Dojo has around 3,000 D1 chips, providing a total of 1.1 exaflops (BF16/CFP8) of performance.
The company now has several Dojo deployments across different data centers, and is building a Dojo data center at its HQ in Austin, Texas. An Austin-based job listing earlier this year called for "first-of-its-kind data centers."
In August, a Morgan Stanley analyst said that the Dojo supercomputer could add up to $500 billion to Tesla's enterprise value.
Alongside Dojo, Tesla is known to have a significant GPU footprint - as of 2021 it had 10,000 GPUs across three HPC clusters.
CEO Elon Musk in July said that that number is only set to grow: "We’ll actually take Nvidia hardware as fast as Nvidia will deliver it to us," he said. "Tremendous respect for Jensen [Huang, CEO and founder] and Nvidia. They’ve done an incredible job.
"And frankly, I don’t know, if they could deliver us enough GPUs, we might not need Dojo - but they can’t."
