Elon Musk Shares Ambitious Plan To Transform Dojo Into 'Sellable Service' Akin To Amazon Web Services

Tesla Inc TSLA CEO Elon Musk said at the company's first-quarter earnings call on Wednesday that the automaker's supercomputer Dojo's "potential is very significant."

What Happened: Musk said that Tesla is "putting a lot of effort" into Dojo and believes that it has the "potential for an order of magnitude improvement in cost of training."

The entrepreneur was referring to Tesla's neural net training capabilities which he said was one of the "main limiting factors" of achieving full autonomy when it came to full self-driving of vehicles.

"Dojo also has the potential to become a sellable service that we would offer to other companies in the same way that Amazon Web Services offers web services, even though it started out as a bookstore," said Musk.

Amazon Web Services is the cloud computing unit of Amazon.com, Inc AMZN.

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Why It Matters: Musk described the supercomputer as a "long-shot bet" in response to a question at the conference call.

"If it’s a long-shot bet that pays off, it will pay off in a very, very big way. But potentially, yeah, potentially in a very, very big way, Like in the multi-hundred billion dollar level."

He said that it was a "bet worth making" and not the sort of bet where you say "take it to the bank type of thing." He then went on to take a dig at banks by saying taking it to the bank isn't "as secure as it used to be."

Tesla showed off Dojo at the company's AI day in September last year. At the time, the automaker's Dojo Project Lead Ganesh Venkataramanan said that a no-limits philosophy was the guiding point for the supercomputer.

On Wednesday, Tesla reported first-quarter revenue of $23.33 billion, a rise of 24% year-over-year, which beat Street estimates of $23.21 billion, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Price Action: Tesla shares slipped nearly 6.1% in the after-hours trading to $169.65 after closing the regular session almost 2% down at $180.59.

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