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Tesla Reportedly Shuts Down Dojo Supercomputer Team, Reassigns Workers

Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's Fremont, Calif., factory on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's Fremont, Calif., factory on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
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Tesla Reportedly Shuts Down Dojo Supercomputer Team, Reassigns Workers

Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's Fremont, Calif., factory on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)
Tesla vehicles line a parking area at the company's Fremont, Calif., factory on Tuesday, Aug. 5, 2025. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has ordered to shut down its Dojo supercomputer team, with team leader Peter Bannon departing the company, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The Dojo supercomputer was designed around custom training chips to process vast amounts of data and video from Tesla EVs to train the automaker's autonomous-driving software.

Tesla did not reply to a Reuters request for comment. CEO Elon Musk said on X that it didn't make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two different AI chips.

Over the past year, Tesla, amid a company-wide restructuring, has seen multiple executive departures and thousands of job cuts. The company has redirected its focus to

AI-driven self-driving technology and robotics, with CEO Elon Musk pursuing an integration strategy across his business empire.

In March, xAI acquired the social media platform X for $33 billion to bolster its chatbot training capabilities, while Tesla integrated the Grok chatbot into its vehicles.

The automaker also plans to increase its reliance on external technology partners such as Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices for compute, and Samsung Electronics for chip manufacturing, as per the Bloomberg report.

Last month, Samsung secured a $16.5 billion deal to supply AI chips to Tesla, expected to power self-driving cars, humanoid robots and data centers.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk earlier said that Samsung's new chip factory in Taylor, Texas would make Tesla's next-generation AI6 chip.

While no timeline was provided for AI6 chip production, Musk has previously said that next-generation AI5 chips will be produced at the end of 2026, suggesting AI6 would follow.

"The Tesla AI5, AI6 and subsequent chips will be excellent for inference and at least pretty good for training. All effort is focused on that", Musk said in an X post late Thursday.

Musk also said that in a supercomputer cluster, it would make sense to put many AI5/AI6 chips. "One could call that Dojo 3, I suppose", he said.

The Dojo team recently lost about 20 workers to newly formed DensityAI, and the remaining workers are being reassigned to other data center and compute projects within Tesla, the Bloomberg report said.

Nvidia declined to comment on the Bloomberg report, while AMD and Samsung did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

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Technology

Huawei's New AI Chip Finds Favor with ByteDance, Alibaba Which Plan to Place Orders

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Huawei is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Huawei is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
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Huawei's New AI Chip Finds Favor with ByteDance, Alibaba Which Plan to Place Orders

FILE PHOTO: The logo of Huawei is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: The logo of Huawei is seen at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, June 12, 2025. REUTERS/Benoit Tessier/File Photo

Customer testing of Huawei's new AI chip, designed to challenge Nvidia in the China market, has gone well and big tech giants including ByteDance and Alibaba plan to place orders, two people familiar with the matter said.

The development marks a milestone for Huawei, said Reuters.

Despite a government campaign to encourage the use of domestic semiconductors, the Shenzhen-based firm struggled to persuade big tech firms in the private sector to adopt its current flagship chip, the Ascend 910C, in large quantities, industry sources have previously said.

This ‌time around, tech ‌firms intend to use the new 950PR more extensively, much happier ‌now ⁠that the chip ⁠is more compatible with Nvidia's CUDA software system and has better response speeds, said the two people and a third person with knowledge of those plans.

Huawei plans to ship around 750,000 950PRs this year, according to two of the people. They said samples were sent to customers in January, and that mass production should begin next month, setting the stage for fully fledged shipments to start in the second half of the year.

The sources were not authorized to speak ⁠to media and declined to be identified. Huawei, ByteDance, Alibaba did not reply ‌to Reuters requests for comments.

RESTRICTIONS ON NVIDIA CHIPS

A ‌launch of the 950PR comes at a difficult time for Nvidia in China. Many of its ‌artificial intelligence chips have been banned from sale in China by Washington on worries ‌that the technology could boost the capabilities of the Chinese military.

The Trump administration last year greenlighted the sale of Nvidia's H200 chips - more powerful than currently restricted products - albeit with a number of conditions that could limit amounts sold.

The H200 has also recently received approval from Chinese authorities, but it remains unclear ‌when they will be allowed into the country.

Huawei mentioned its new chip last September when it outlined its long-term semiconductor plans for ⁠the first time and ⁠said it would be launching some of the world's most powerful computing systems.

The 950PR, which uses traditional DDR memory, will be priced at around 50,000 yuan ($6,900) per card, while a premium version with faster HBM memory will sell for around 70,000 yuan, the sources said.

Where previously Huawei had stuck to its proprietary CANN software system, the new chips will allow developers at Chinese tech firms, which have generally used Nvidia's software system thus far, to migrate those models more easily.

The sources said that compared to the 910C, the chip only offers a small improvement in raw computing power, but it is designed to excel in handling inference workloads - the process of running trained AI models to answer queries or execute tasks.

Demand for AI inference computing in China is surging as the country's tech sector shifts its focus from model development to real-world deployment, a trend turbocharged by the rapid adoption of open-source AI agent OpenClaw.

Technology

ByteDance Quietly Rolls Out SeeDance 2.0 Globally

A smartphone displays the logo of Seedance 2.0, the image-to-video and text-to-video AI model. Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP/File
A smartphone displays the logo of Seedance 2.0, the image-to-video and text-to-video AI model. Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP/File
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ByteDance Quietly Rolls Out SeeDance 2.0 Globally

A smartphone displays the logo of Seedance 2.0, the image-to-video and text-to-video AI model. Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP/File
A smartphone displays the logo of Seedance 2.0, the image-to-video and text-to-video AI model. Lionel BONAVENTURE / AFP/File

Chinese artificial intelligence powerhouse and TikTok creator ByteDance has quietly rolled out its latest video generator SeeDance 2.0 worldwide, while its US rival OpenAI called time on a similar product.

The SeeDance 2.0 model was launched in China last month, both stunning and spooking the entertainment industry with its ability to produce near-Hollywood-quality clips from simple text prompts.

However, it has also sparked concerns over copyright infringement, said AFP.

"We have further expanded Dreamina Seedance 2.0 in more markets in CapCut today, across Africa, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, with more regions coming soon," CapCut, ByteDance's popular video editing tool, posted on X on Thursday.

It said the SeeDance 2.0 model would initially be available to some paid users.

The rollout includes "firm safeguards" to prevent violations of its safety policies, including the unauthorized use of individuals' likenesses or intellectual property, CapCut said.

Major Hollywood production studios including Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros and Netflix, have threatened legal action against Beijing-based ByteDance over accusations of copyright infringement.

Reports this month suggested that backlash had prompted ByteDance to pause SeeDance 2.0's global launch.

It was not immediately clear if ByteDance had resolved those legal issues. The United States is not among the current rollout markets.

ByteDance, which runs popular short video platforms TikTok and Douyin, has invested heavily in AI in recent years against a backdrop of increasing global regulatory scrutiny of such platforms.

ByteDance announced on Friday the sale of Moonton, an important gaming asset, to a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia's sovereign fund for more than $6 billion.

Moonton runs Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, one of Southeast Asia's most popular gaming titles.

ByteDance's move coincides with a broader shift in the AI industry towards more "agentic" tools that focus on performing practical, real-life tasks.

US AI giant OpenAI said on Tuesday it was shutting down its popular consumer-facing video-generating service Sora, a move widely understood to focus more on providing business users with agentic AI capacities.

Technology

South Korea to Invest $166 Million in AI Chip Startup Rebellions

People walk near Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, South Korea, 22 March 2026. The band performed their comeback concert on 21 March. EPA/YONHAP
People walk near Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, South Korea, 22 March 2026. The band performed their comeback concert on 21 March. EPA/YONHAP
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South Korea to Invest $166 Million in AI Chip Startup Rebellions

People walk near Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, South Korea, 22 March 2026. The band performed their comeback concert on 21 March. EPA/YONHAP
People walk near Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, South Korea, 22 March 2026. The band performed their comeback concert on 21 March. EPA/YONHAP

South Korea's industry ministry on Tuesday said the Financial Services Commission's advisory board approved a 250 billion won ($166 million) investment in a local artificial intelligence chip startup called Rebellions, part of a government-backed push to nurture a homegrown advanced semiconductor firm.

Here are some details:

South Korea's Financial Services Commission advisory board, which evaluates investments in advanced strategic industries, ⁠approved a 250 ⁠billion won direct investment into Rebellions, an AI chip startup.

Rebellions, founded in 2020, designs neural processing units (NPUs) that handle AI computations.

The decision was made at a ⁠fund management committee meeting for the state-led "National Growth Fund," marking the first direct investment under the country's "K-Nvidia" initiative.

The funding will support Rebellions' mass production of NPU chips and the development of next-generation AI semiconductors, the industry ministry said in a statement.

The "K-Nvidia" project, jointly led by the Financial Services Commission and the ⁠Ministry ⁠of Science and ICT, seeks to nurture a globally competitive AI chip company amid intensifying competition in the sector, which is dominated by US firms like Nvidia.

The move underscores Seoul's efforts to strengthen its position in the AI supply chain and reduce reliance on foreign technology, as demand for high-performance computing chips surges.