Tesla has revealed plans to build a $500 million Dojo supercomputer in New York

Tesla has revealed plans to construct a massive Dojo supercomputer cluster at Gigafactory New York in Bufallo as part of a new $500 million project.

Dojo is a brand-new supercomputer that Tesla created from the ground up with the express purpose of using films to train AI.

Despite major setbacks, the initiative appeared to be gaining traction last year when the first Dojo cluster went up in the summer.

But we also found out that Tesla fired a few of the program's key executives last month.

Moreover, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, called the initiative a "long shot" with a "not a high probability" of success on this week's earnings call.

I would think of Dojo as a long shot. It’s a long shot worth taking because the payoff is potentially very high. But it’s not something that is a high probability.

Concurrently, Musk declared that Tesla is making significant investments in NVIDIA AI processors in order to construct conventional supercomputer clusters that would fuel its AI initiatives.

Many Tesla shareholders this week felt that the program was somewhat thrown into a loop by these latest remarks regarding Dojo.

For this reason, it's unexpected to learn that Tesla is spending $500 million on a new Dojo cluster only a few days later.

This Monday, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York State revealed the new initiative in Bufallo, the location of Tesla's Gigafactory New York.

Musk acknowledged the news right away, but he also mentioned that Tesla is increasing its hardware investments in NVIDIA:

The governor is correct that this is a Dojo Supercomputer, but $500M, while obviously a large sum of money, is only equivalent to a 10k H100 system from Nvidia. Tesla will spend more than that on Nvidia hardware this year. The table stakes for being competitive in AI are at least several billion dollars per year at this point.

The CEO reaffirmed that Tesla will begin purchasing AMD hardware as well.

To support its AI initiatives, such as Optimus and Full Self-Driving, Tesla is investing in as much computing power as it can get.