Tesla is building a second, bigger Optimus factory in Austin, CFO says

CFO Vaibhav Taneja said construction has started on an Austin Optimus factory that will outproduce Fremont. No capacity figure or opening date yet.

Tesla has started constructing a second Optimus factory in Austin that will be able to make far more humanoid robots than its line in Fremont, chief financial officer Vaibhav Taneja said on the company's third-quarter 2026 earnings call on October 21. The Fremont line only just began what Tesla calls production-quality builds of the humanoid robot.

Taneja raised the Austin site in response to an analyst question about ramping Optimus production for training before the robot's hands are finished. Elon Musk answered first, saying the company is building robots that do not have perfected hands while it advances training, the supply chain and the production system in parallel. Taneja added that the Austin building 'would be able to do a lot more robots as compared to the Fremont one,' and that the company is 'going at the fastest pace as we can.' Musk called the posture a gamble: 'We're definitely, as they say in Vegas, betting on the come.'

The reason for building so many robots this early is training data. Tesla's cars learn from a huge fleet on the road; Optimus has no fleet yet. Musk said the company needs 'on the order of 10,000 or 20,000 bots' for an 'Optimus Academy' where the robots practice a wide range of tasks through self-play, generating the data the robot's AI cannot yet get from the real world.

Neither executive gave a capacity number or an opening date for the Austin building, and the company's Q3 update materials list the Texas site as under construction. Musk reiterated that customer deliveries are likely 'towards the end of next year,' with hands and long-term durability still the hardest engineering problems. For the quarter, Tesla reported $28.05 billion in revenue and adjusted earnings of 48 cents a share; shares closed October 22 at $379.41, down 1.83%.