Tesla is expected to invest over $500 million to build a Dojo supercomputer at its New York Gigafactory, it was announced at a state budget press conference this week.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul held a hearing on the state's economic developments on Friday and officially announced that Tesla plans to build its next Dojo supercomputing cluster at its Gigafactory in Buffalo (via WGRZ). Hochul said the project would require an investment of $500 million and would also involve the construction of a separate artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer at the State University of New York (SUNY).
“I am also proud to announce that Tesla is investing $500 million to build its next supercomputer here in Buffalo,” Hochul said.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk later confirmed plans to build the supercomputing cluster on AI would cost “at least several billion dollars per year.”
Tesla's New York Gigafactory is currently building the solar panels, solar roof and electrical components for the company's Superchargers, while the site also has a number of employees responsible for Autopilot data analysis.
She did not provide a timeline for installation plans, although New York's governor also cited $275 million in funding from a state grant and over $400 million in public and private funding for the Empire AI program at SUNY.
Additionally, Hochul says the global AI market has reached a total value of about $150 billion, although it is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion in just a few years.
The news comes after Tesla Dojo project lead Ganesh Venkataramanan left the company last month and after Musk said in June last year that Dojo had already been “online and performing useful tasks for several months.”
The Dojo supercomputer is expected to be able to process massive amounts of sensor data to train the AI on real driving footage. Beyond Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) beta systems, Dojo is expected to have several potential applications and be one of the most productive computing clusters in the world.
You can watch WGRZ's full video of the briefing below, with Hochul's statements about Tesla lasting about 33 minutes.
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