Following its previous announcement of a $1 billion investment in Dojo, Tesla’s supercomputer, Elon Musk seems to be doubling down on artificial intelligence as Tesla is believed to be building a secret  data center at its headquarters in Austin, Texas, as reported by The Information. Tesla’s data needs are significantly increasing as it aims to invest in self-driving cars, artificial intelligence and robotics. The electric car company has already been expanding its data center operations, including the deployment of its Dojo supercomputer and its use of NTT Global Data Centers’ facility in Sacramento.

The Dojo supercomputer, located in San Jose, California, is a critical part of Tesla’s efforts to train self-driving vehicle systems. It features the custom-designed Dojo D1 chip architecture. 

When Tesla initially installed Dojo, they designed a custom cooling distribution unit to support high power densities of over 200kW per cabinet. The cabinets themselves were also custom-built. The Dojo supercomputer was expected to incorporate around 3,000 custom D1 chips, resulting in a total performance of 1.1 exaflops (BF16/CFP8).

In addition to Dojo, Tesla has a substantial GPU presence, with approximately 10,000 GPUs distributed across three high-performance computing clusters as of 2021. Musk indicated in July that this number was set to increase, and Tesla was ready to acquire Nvidia hardware at a fast pace, as they have a high regard for Nvidia’s technology. However, Musk noted that even with Nvidia’s hardware, Tesla might still need Dojo due to its unique requirements.

Details about the new data center in Austin still remain undisclosed. Tesla had earlier posted a job advertisement on its website requesting a senior engineering program manager that will lead the end-to-end design and engineering of Tesla’s first of its kind data centers.