Tesla to build ‘first of its kind’ data centres

Tesla is set to build ‘first of its kind’ data centres, according to a job posting by the automotive company.

The job posting stated that the Elon Musk-founded company is looking for a Senior Engineering Program Manager to lead ‘the full design and engineering of Tesla Data Centers from concept to launch’.

Candidates for the Texas-based job are expected to conduct technical deep dives into layout designs, infrastructure system and distribution selections, and ensure data center development is ‘adhering to Tesla’s core principles’.

The technical specifics of Tesla’s first of a kind data centre are unclear, but this will further plant Tesla in the data centre market after it built a data centre in Nevada.

The company also unveiled its Dojo supercomputer to train its fleet of driverless cars in 2022, which has a custom cooling distribution unit to support more than 2MW per cabinet. In 2021, an employee said that the company possessed had the world’s 7th largest supercomputer, measured by GPU count.

Some of Tesla’s vehicles upload telemetry data that needs to be processed, which might explain the need for its own data centres.

When Musk took over X (formerly Twitter), the social media giant halted a number of bill payments, including some data centre bills. Tesla took over X/Twitter’s data centre space in an NTT facility based in Sacramento, suggesting the need for more capacity.

Musk said that the Californian city was ‘possibly the worst place to have a data centre’ for the social media platform, with the hot climate cited as the main concern.

With Tesla setting its sights on building its own data centres, it is yet another example of the growing need for owned facilities to support rapidly advancing technologies like AI and supercomputing.

Unsurprisingly, the data centre market is valued in excess of $250 billion.

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