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What To Expect From The Tesla AI Day 2022 Event
On September 30th, Elon Musk will give an overview of the company’s journey to fully autonomous vehicles, as well as officially announcing the Optimus Robot.
Tesla is hosting an “AI Day” event on September 30th, where Elon Musk’s company will showcase ongoing developments towards the complete automation of its vehicles, ultimately leading to a range of entirely driverless cars.
This year’s event, however, promises something that will almost certainly overshadow Tesla’s automated cars: A robot called Optimus, which Elon Musk is billing as having “the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time.”
Optimus Tesla Bot
The Optimus robot is causing something of a stir online. Many believe it may be a gimmick to showcase Tesla’s other AI projects, whereas others are skeptical it will ever turn out to be real. One thing is certain though: Tesla is arguably one of the biggest robotics pioneers in the world, so it makes sense that the company is keen to produce a humanoid robot.
Musk has stated that the Optimus robot will be “friendly” with human-like hands and a fully self-driving Tesla computer for a brain. Tesla engineers think it will likely be another 10 years before the Optimus bot is ready to be sold to consumers. However, a large portion of the company’s resources seem to be being funneled into the project.
Autonomous Vehicle Update
Back to real-world technology, the Tesla AI Day will feature announcements that most regular people have been waiting for. The company has already announced that 160,000 drivers across North America are beta testing its vehicles in a fully driverless format, so it will be interesting to hear updates on a program that hasn’t been without controversy (read: plenty of crashes and accidents!).
Dojo
Alongside autonomous cars and robots, AI Day will also feature news on Dojo, a powerful Nvidia-based supercomputer that will train the company’s AI systems. Last year, the computer was still in development, so it will be interesting to see what’s been achieved in the previous twelve months. Musk has claimed that Dojo will be capable of an exaFLOP of computing — for us mere mortals, we’d have to perform one calculation per second for 31,688,765,000 years to match what Dojo can achieve in a second!
Overall, we’re expecting big things from Tesla’s AI Day 2022, which will be a chance for the company to lay out its vision for the future, which will undoubtedly be something to look forward to in an era that currently seems increasingly pessimistic.
You’ll be able to watch the event on Tesla’s official YouTube channel here.
News
Microsoft Plans $10 Billion-Plus Gulf Expansion Despite Iran Conflict
Security is shaping Microsoft’s approach, from resilience work with governments to what it will say about how the money splits by country.
Microsoft is planning more than $10 billion of investment across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Kuwait through 2030, Vice Chair and President Brad Smith told Reuters, calling the spending schedule aggressive. The Iranian conflict that began on February 28 has not persuaded the company to scale back.
“We’re sustaining all the investments we planned to make before this conflict started, and we are in fact adding to them,” Smith said. The $10 billion-plus total does not, however, show how large those additions are.
The investment, which Smith described as part of Microsoft’s continued infrastructure expansion, is aimed at cloud and AI infrastructure and at the company’s growing regional operations. Microsoft also intends to put more than $400 million into subsea and terrestrial connectivity across the Middle East by 2030.
The spending fits the region’s own ambitions too. Gulf governments have been investing heavily in AI infrastructure as part of a push to diversify their economies beyond oil and gas and turn themselves into global technology hubs. Major cloud and AI providers have been drawn in part by the land and relatively low-cost energy on offer.
Microsoft is widening its partnerships with regional AI companies, though not on identical terms. In 2024, it invested $1.5 billion in Abu Dhabi-based G42 for a minority stake, and Smith currently sits on G42’s board. Saudi Arabia’s Humain and Qatar’s Qai are working with Microsoft on selected priority areas, but Smith said the company does not plan to make capital investments in either.
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The conflict has added another strand to Microsoft’s work in the region. Since it began, Smith said, the company has supported regional partners with digital resilience assessments, and it is now working with Gulf countries through a digital resilience initiative focused on preparedness and the protection of critical data.
So far, the company has given no country-by-country breakdown of the investment, citing security among other factors. So while the headline figure is public, how Microsoft divides the spending among the four countries is not.
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