Elon Musk said over the long weekend that Tesla aims to restart work on Dojo3, the electric vehicle company’s previously abandoned third-generation AI chip. Only this time, Dojo3 won’t be aimed at training self-driving models on Earth. Instead, Musk says it will be dedicated to “space-based AI compute.”
The move comes five months after Tesla effectively shut down its Dojo effort. The company disbanded the team behind its Dojo supercomputer following the departure of Dojo lead Peter Bannon. Around 20 Dojo workers also left to join DensityAI, a new AI infrastructure startup founded by former Dojo head Ganesh Venkataramanan and ex-Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering.
At the time of Dojo’s shutdown, Bloomberg reported Tesla planned to increase its reliance on Nvidia and other partners like AMD for compute and Samsung for chip manufacturing, rather than continue developing its own custom silicon. Musk’s latest comments suggest the strategy has shifted again.
The billionaire executive and Republican megadonor said in a post on X the decision to revive Dojo was based on the state of its in-house chip roadmap, noting that Tesla’s AI5 chip design was “in good shape.”
Tesla’s AI5 chip, made by TSMC, was designed to power the automaker’s automated driving features and Optimus humanoid robots. Last summer, Tesla signed a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to build its AI6 chips that promise to power Tesla vehicles and Optimus, as well as enable high-performance AI training in data centers.
“AI7/Dojo3 will be for space-based AI compute,” Musk said on Sunday, positioning the resurrected project as more of a moonshot.
To achieve that, Tesla is now gearing up to rebuild the team it dismantled months ago. Musk used the same post to recruit engineers directly, writing: “If you’re interested in working on what will be the highest volume chips in the world, send a note to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with 3 bullet points on the toughest technical problems you’ve solved.”
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The timing of the announcement is notable. At CES 2026, Nvidia unveiled Alpamayo, an open-source AI model for autonomous driving that directly challenges Tesla’s FSD software. Musk commented on X that solving the long tail of rare edge cases in driving is “super hard,” adding: “I honestly hope they succeed.”
Musk and several other AI executives have argued the future of data centers may lie off-planet, since Earth’s power grids are already strained to the max. Axios recently reported Musk rival and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also excited by the prospect of putting data centers into orbit. Musk has an edge over his peers because he already controls the launch vehicles.
Per Axios, Musk plans to use SpaceX’s upcoming IPO to help finance his vision of using Starship to launch a constellation of compute satellites that can operate in constant sunlight, harvesting solar power 24/7.
Still, there are many roadblocks to making AI datacenters in space a possibility, not least the challenge of cooling high-power compute in a vacuum. Musk’s comments of Tesla building “space-based AI compute” fit a familiar pattern: float an idea that sounds far-fetched, then try to brute-force it into reality.
