Monday, Tesla shares went up more than 10% after Morgan Stanley upgraded them and wrote a positive note about how Tesla could sell AI technology to other cars and save money by using as many of its own GPUs as possible instead of buying chips from Nvidia.
Analysts at Morgan Stanley said that Tesla should be seen as a tech business as well as a company that makes electric cars. As of Monday, the firm raised its price goal for Tesla shares from $250 to $400. This was done to emphasize the promise of Tesla’s Dojo supercomputer project and its custom silicon. Morgan Stanley thinks that Dojo could add up to $500 billion to the value of the company in the long run.
In July of this year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the company plans to spend more than $1 billion on Dojo by the end of 2024. Tesla is making Dojo to help train AI machine learning and computer vision for its cars and its new robots project. Tesla uses video clips and data from its customers’ cars, among other things, to improve software and make new features.
Adam Jonas, a Tesla expert who is very optimistic, wrote in a note on Monday, “Dojo is still in its early stages of development, but we think that in the long run, it can be used for more than just cars. Dojo is made to handle visual data, which can be used to build AI models for fields like robots, healthcare, and security that are built on vision. Once Tesla makes progress on self-driving and software, we think that third-party Dojo services can offer investors the next step in Tesla’s growth story.
Morgan Stanley also thinks that Tesla will be able to make $2,160 per month from its car owners in 2030. This will come from services made possible by Dojo and subscription software in cars, such as self-driving systems, which Tesla doesn’t offer yet, vehicle charging services, maintenance, software upgrades, content, and other things that will be made in the future.
Elon Musk said that a Tesla would drive across the country without any help from a person by the end of 2017. Tesla cars still only have advanced driver aid systems, which require a person to be behind the wheel and ready to turn or stop at any time.
Deutsche Bank, on the other hand, is optimistic about Tesla and set a price target of $300 in a note that came out on September 6. The note said that Tesla faces risks in Q3 from “planned summer production shutdowns that will push both production and deliveries down QoQ, discounts on inventories, and limited positive cost offsets in the quarter.”
Earlier this quarter, Tesla cut the prices of its electric cars after executives warned investors on the company’s last earnings call that production and shipping rates would likely be lower than in the second quarter due to planned plant closures.
Tesla also dropped the price of its high-end driver assistance system, which is sold in the U.S. under the brand name Full Self-Driving or FSD, from $15,000 to $12,000. Among other things, these price cuts had hurt Tesla’s share price in the past few weeks. But after the Morgan Stanley note on Monday, Tesla shares shot up to more than $272 in the middle of the day.
