The head of Tesla's Dojo supercomputer project has been exposed to have resigned.
On December 7th local time, according to authoritative media reports, informed sources revealed that Ganesh Venkataramanan, the project leader of Tesla's supercomputer Dojo, resigned last month, which may affect Tesla's autonomous driving technology.
Venkataramanan has been responsible for Tesla's Dojo supercomputing project for 5 years. Prior to joining Tesla, he worked for nearly 15 years at the well-known American semiconductor company AMD. According to insiders, Ganesh has "disappeared" from Tesla's employee list this Wednesday (December 6th) local time, and at least one member of the Dojo project team has also resigned.
According to insiders, after Venkataramanan left, Peter Bannon took over the Dojo supercomputing project. Bannon has 7 years of executive experience at Tesla, prior to which he worked as an executive at Apple.
Dojo is Tesla's own customized supercomputer platform for artificial intelligence machine learning, helping to train its autonomous driving skills, and also providing computing power support for Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus. Tesla officially announced the Dojo project in 2021 and plans to invest over $1 billion in it by 2024.
In September of this year, a report by Wall Street investment bank Morgan Stanley (Morgan Stanley) on Tesla Dojo drove Tesla's market value to skyrocket by $79.9 billion (approximately RMB 580 billion) overnight.
The Morgan Stanley analyst team mentioned in the report that Tesla's Dojo supercomputer will bring a market value increase of up to $500 billion (approximately RMB 3.6 trillion) to Tesla.
Based on this, Morgan Stanley has raised Tesla's rating from "held" to "overmatched", and raised its target price for the next 12-18 months from $250 per share to $400, a 60% increase, becoming the highest price offered by Wall Street. According to this estimate, Tesla's market value will reach $1.39 trillion.
The report states that the reasons for the departure of these executives or employees are currently unknown, but their departure will undoubtedly have a blow to this heavily invested project.
This is another major talent loss for Tesla recently. Just last year, Andrej Karpathy, former head of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous driving at Tesla, announced his resignation as a key figure in the development of Tesla's AI and autonomous driving technology.