Elon Musk said over the long weekend that Tesla plans to restart work on Dojo3, an electric vehicle company. before leaving third generation AI chip. Only this time, Dojo3 won’t be aiming to train a self-driving model on Earth. Instead, Musk said it would be dedicated to “space-based AI computing.”
The move comes five months after Tesla effectively shut it down Work hard. The company disbanded the team behind the Dojo supercomputer following the departure of Dojo chief Peter Bannon. About 20 Dojo workers as well left to integrate DensityAIa new AI infrastructure startup founded by the former head of Dojo Ganesh Venkataramanan and former Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Floering.
When Dojo closed, Bloomberg reported Tesla planned to increase its reliance on Nvidia and other partners like AMD for computing and Samsung for chip manufacturing, instead of continuing to develop its own custom silicon. Musk’s latest comments indicate that the strategy has changed again.
Billionaire executive and Republican Megadonor said in a post on X the decision to revive Dojo is based on the state of the chip roadmap at home, noting that Tesla’s AI5 chip design is “in good shape.”
Tesla’s AI5 chip, made by TSMC, is designed to power Optimus’ humanoid robot and self-driving features. Last summer, Tesla entered a $16.5 billion deal with Samsung to build an AI6 chip that promises to power Tesla and Optimus vehicles, as well as enable high-performance AI training in data centers.
“AI7/Dojo3 will be for space-based AI computing,” Musk said said there, the position of the project was resurrected as more than a moonshot.
To achieve that, Tesla is now ready to rebuild the team that was dismantled months ago. Musk used the same post to recruit engineers directly, writing: “If you are interested in working on what will be the world’s highest volume chip, send a note to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with 3 bullet points about the hardest technical problem you have solved.
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The timing of the announcement is important. At CES 2026, Nvidia announced thatan open-source AI model for autonomous driving that directly challenges Tesla’s FSD software. Musk commented on the X that it solves the long tail of rare edge cases in driving “super hard,” adding: “I really hope to succeed.”
Musk and several other AI executives have said that the future of data centers may not be on the planet, as Earth’s power grid is strained to the max. Axios recently reported Musk’s rival and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also excited by the prospect of putting a data center in orbit. Musk has an advantage over his peers because he already controls the launch vehicle.
Per Axios, Musk plans to use it SpaceX’s upcoming IPO to help fund his vision of using Starship to launch a constellation of computing satellites that can operate in continuous sunlight, generating solar power 24/7.
However, there are many roadblocks to creating an AI data center in space, not the least of which is the challenge of computing high-power computing in a vacuum. Musk’s comments about Tesla building “Space-based AI computing” fit a familiar pattern: float an idea that sounds far-fetched, then try to force it into reality.