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Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project lead Ganesh Venkataramanan has left the company, according to people familiar with the matter, a setback to the self-driving car maker’s efforts.
Venkataramanan, who led Dojo’s operations for the past five years, left the EV maker last month, the people said, asking not to be identified to discuss confidential information. Peter Bannon, the former director of Apple Inc. and executive at Tesla for the past seven years, is now leading the project.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and company representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The Dojo system is a computer system that Tesla has designed to teach the machine learning models behind the EV maker’s self-driving system. The computer takes the data captured by the cars and processes them quickly to improve the company’s algorithms. According to analysts, Dojo can be a significant competitor, and earlier this year Morgan Stanley estimated that it could add $500 billion at Tesla’s price.
Musk said the automaker plans to spend more than that $1 billion on Project Dojo at the end of 2024. The Tesla leader first shared plans for the supercomputer in 2019 before it was officially announced in 2021.
Dojo is powered by a standard D1 circuit designed by Venkataramanan, Bannon and many other big names from the silicon industry. Venkataramanan previously worked at Advanced Micro Devices Inc., but Tesla has many other veterans from chip design to staff. The recently departed executive established Tesla’s AI hardware and silicon teams in 2016.
In recent weeks, Tesla also installed equipment for Dojo at a center in Palo Alto, California, two of the people said. Dojo relied on a lot of data in different places.
As of Wednesday, Venkataramanan had not appeared in Tesla’s showrooms, one of the people said. At least one other member of the group has left. The reason behind the departure could not be immediately known, but it is putting an obstacle to the luxury and technological projects.
Tesla previously relied on supercomputers from Nvidia Corp. to strengthen its AI policies, but Dojo will compete with offerings from Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and IBM. In July, Tesla said it began production of the Dojo supercomputer system. It is produced by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd., the same maker of chips used by Apple.
Last year, another artificial intelligence player left Tesla: Andrej Karpathy, who led AI efforts in the car. Karpathy has since joined OpenAI.