Elon Musk says Tesla’s relaunched Dojo3 will be ‘space-based AI compute’

Elon Musk said over the weekend that Tesla plans to restart work on Dojo3, an electric car company. already abandoned third generation AI chip. Only now, Dojo3 does not aim to train people to drive themselves on Earth. Instead, Musk says it will be dedicated to “AI computing centers.”

The move comes five months after Tesla closed for good Dojo effort. The company dissolved the team behind its Dojo mainframe following the departure of Dojo chief Peter Bannon. About 20 Dojo employees too left to match DensityAIa new AI startup founded by the former head of Dojo Ganesh Venkataramanan and former Tesla employees Bill Chang and Ben Florering.

At the time of closing Dojo, Bloomberg reported that Tesla wanted to increase its reliance on Nvidia and other partners such as AMD for computing and Samsung for chip manufacturing, instead of continuing to develop its own silicon. Musk’s latest comments suggest that strategy has changed again.

The biggest billionaire is Republican megadonor said a post on X the decision to revive the Dojo was based on the chip’s internal design, noting that Tesla’s AI5 design for the device was “still in good shape.”

Tesla’s AI5 chip, developed by TSMC, is designed to power the automaker’s robotics and Optimus humanoid robots. Last summer, Tesla signed a $ 16.5 billion meets Samsung to build AI6 chips that promise to power Tesla and Optimus cars, and support advanced AI training in data centers.

“AI7/Dojo3 will be a place-based AI compute,” Musk he said On Sunday, I put the resurrected work as a picture of the moon.

In order to achieve this, Tesla is now planning to rebuild the team that it terminated months ago. Musk also used the same approach to recruit engineers directly, writing: “If you want to work on what will be the world’s best chips, send a message to AI_Chips@Tesla.com with three bullet points for the most difficult problems you have solved.”

The announcement period is known. At CES 2026, Nvidia was exposed Alpamayoan open-source AI self-driving car model that directly challenges Tesla’s FSD software. Musk once said of X that solving the long tail of rare cases of driving is “very difficult,” adding: “I hope they succeed.”

Musk and several other AI executives say the future of data centers may be on Earth, as the world’s power grids are already exhausted. Axios recently reported Musk’s competitor and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is also excited about the prospect of putting data into orbit. Musk has an edge over his peers because he already controls startup cars.

According to Axios, Musk wants to use it The upcoming IPO of SpaceX to support his vision of using Starship to launch a constellation of satellites that can operate around the sun, harvesting solar energy 24/7.

However, there are many obstacles to making space-based AI data centers feasible, most notably the problem of cooling high-powered computers in vacuum. Musk’s comments about Tesla building an “AI hub” echo a familiar strategy: float an idea that sounds far-fetched, then try to force it to become reality.