How Tesla's Dojo supercomputer will power the 'Muskonomy'
Tesla stock (TSLA) popped this week — 6% on Monday — as influential Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas talked up the artificial intelligence and Dojo supercomputer prospects for the electric vehicle maker. The Dojo effect will be even bigger on the so-called Muskonomy, which Jonas dubbed the other companies in the Musk empire.
But first, a primer.
Tesla's Dojo supercomputer consists of several "system trays" of the company’s in-house D1 chips, which are built into cabinets that then merge into an "ExaPOD" supercomputer. Several ExaPODs can be strung together in clusters, making even more powerful supercomputers.
According to Morgan Stanley, a version of the Dojo supercomputer has been up and running since July and will eventually have the power to crunch FSD (full-self driving) visual data from the 400,000+ vehicles running FSD software, in order to train Tesla’s AI model and FSD chips inside every Tesla vehicle. This is what Tesla had in mind for Dojo — to accelerate its self-driving and other AI-driven software initiatives.
But Musk has said recently that Tesla also envisions a scenario where it can use Dojo as a cloud SaaS (software as a service) supercomputer for other companies, and charge hefty fees for its use, like Amazon (AMZN) does with its AWS cloud product.
Jonas believes Tesla’s Network Services (SaaS/Dojo cloud services) will not only be a revenue driver for the company, but also will help boost the prospects of Musk’s other businesses: X (formerly Twitter), SpaceX, Tesla’s battery business, and even Neuralink and the Boring Company. This is what Jonas calls the "Muskonomy."
"We think that there's a possibility that the Dojo system isn’t just being built to accelerate and train FSD and Optimus (Tesla bot); rather it could be a solution that builds a moat around Tesla and Musk-universe companies with highly advanced ML (machine learning) and AI capabilities," Jonas wrote to his clients. "Looking internally at other Musk companies, we believe that Dojo may have the capability to be the core of the Muskonomy."
For example, "Twitter can benefit from shifting away from its current compute systems and switching to no/low-cost data computation from the most powerful supercomputer systems in the world, greatly accelerating the platform to new heights," Jonas wrote. Owning and operating a free speech platform like Twitter/X provides a number of challenges — and supercomputing has the potential to handle multiple tasks like content moderation for example, and perhaps even advertising optimization.
SpaceX is another company, with its vast array of satellites, that could benefit from supercomputer capabilities.
"Since the satellites communicate through lasers, large amounts of data is required for precise measurements needed to connect and hand off [data to other satellites]," Jonas said, adding that "immense computational power is required in the field of orbital debris mitigation and avoidance for the satellites need to avoid collisions, where the required metrology can benefit from AI computations."
Finally, battery design and construction can require a substantial amount of supercomputer and AI power.
Predictive analysis from Dojo can be used to model the thermal properties of batteries, magnetic fields, and chemical reactions needed to design batteries, and to test theoretical designs. And yes, another off-the-shelf product that Tesla could offer to other EV makers down the line.
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Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.
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