Tesla exceeds jobs requirement at Buffalo plant, rebounding from earlier round of cuts Tesla finished last year with 2,059 full-time jobs at its Riverbend factory on South Park Avenue, up from 1,684 in late May after layoffs slashed its local staff by more than 15%, according to a report filed by the company. But Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, signaled a change in course with messages posted on X on Friday. "It doesn’t make sense for Tesla to divide its resources and scale two quite different AI chip designs," he wrote. Media reports said that with the demise of the Dojo project, Tesla would rely more heavily on Nvidia and AMD. By the time of the 2024 announcement, Tesla had been working on Dojo for at least five years. The idea was to develop artificial intelligence systems that can handle the complex tasks that are required by Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system, as well as its efforts to develop “full self-driving” capabilities. State officials were not immediately available to comment. The Tesla plant was originally built, with $958 million in state funds, as a facility to make solar panels and, later, Tesla's complex, but costly, solar roof. The hopes were that the investment would make Buffalo a leader in solar energy production at a time when the push to renewable energy was growing. Instead, Tesla pulled back on its rooftop solar business, a partnership with Panasonic to make conventional solar panels failed and the solar roof failed to catch on with consumers. To meet its job targets and avoid a $41.2 million annual penalty, Tesla shifted the focus of the Buffalo plant to manufacturing most of the superchargers used at 7,000 charging sites worldwide, mostly in the U.S. Matt Glynn