Aug 7 (Reuters) - 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 ( NVDA ) and

Advanced Micro Devices ( AMD ) for compute, and Samsung

Electronics ( SSNLF ) 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 ( NVDA ) declined to comment on the Bloomberg report, while

AMD and Samsung did not immediately respond to Reuters requests

for comment.

(Reporting by Preetika Parashuraman, Mrinmay Dey and Chandni

Shah in Bengaluru; Editing by Alan Barona and Mrigank Dhaniwala)