I'm sure that it's at least partially for them to have a better negotiating position with NVIDIA. But the reality is that Tesla actually has some very good expertise in chip design. Jim Keller worked there for several years and along with Pete Bannon designed their Autopilot HW3 computer which is in 1+ million cars right now. At the time that HW3 was released it outperformed what NVIDIA had to offer. That said it's not likely they'll be able to beat NVIDIA, but they may be able to beat them for their hyper domain specific use cases. Additionally NVIDIA chips are difficult to get and they're extremely expensive. Even if Tesla can get something that performs 80-90% as good as NVIDIA but at significantly lower cost then it may still be worth it.
I know these things. I think some of the dojo architecture was a reaction to their FSD chips being over optimized for resnet style models. They’re targeting extremely large models which is a new frontier for ML and in my view not the panacea they hoped it would be.
I think with better ML they wouldn’t need so many chips, be it NVidia or Dojo.
