Riyadh Municipality Integrates Robots, Smart Technologies into Stormwater Drainage Network Maintenance

The Saudi flag. Asharq Al-Awsat
The Saudi flag. Asharq Al-Awsat
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Riyadh Municipality Integrates Robots, Smart Technologies into Stormwater Drainage Network Maintenance

The Saudi flag. Asharq Al-Awsat
The Saudi flag. Asharq Al-Awsat

The Riyadh Municipality has announced the introduction of specialized robots and smart technologies into its regular operations for inspecting stormwater drainage networks and their components for proactive maintenance.

The robots can navigate through water and various surfaces, measure and analyze the networks, contributing to swift and effective decision-making.

The robots operate by capturing three-dimensional, 360-degree images of the networks and converting the results into data through artificial intelligence (AI). This maximizes the use of technology to expedite the municipality's tasks, ensure the readiness of stormwater drainage networks, and develop proactive maintenance plans.

The Riyadh Municipality continues to oversee regular, preventive, and scheduled maintenance of all components of the stormwater drainage networks in Riyadh. This aims to ensure the safety and readiness of the networks’ components and addresses network malfunctions and surrounding issues using modern technologies that help identify and resolve problems.

These efforts are part of the municipality's ongoing commitment to providing quality services to residents and maintaining public safety, aligning with its strategy to promote digital transformation and support urban growth.



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.