Elon Musk laid out Tesla's plans for its Optimus robots and for Terafab, the chip manufacturing project in Texas, during the third-quarter 2026 earnings call.
According to one source, Musk says Tesla will need to build tens of thousands of robots to gather the training data it needs. The plan reportedly includes 10,000 Optimus units practicing a wide range of tasks in an "academy", with the data feeding a flywheel to improve performance.
On production, the Fremont line is already getting started, with most of the equipment for a line designed for one million units a year installed. Musk expects it will take at least a year, maybe longer, to reach 20,000 units a week, because parts of the design are still changing. Tesla expects to begin delivering Optimus to outside companies around the end of 2027, initially for industrial, dangerous or repetitive work.
Terafab: timeline and costs
Terafab, the chip fab Tesla is building in Austin with SpaceX, should begin commissioning machinery in the first half of 2027. A first test chip is expected around May or June, with useful chip production at volume targeted for the third quarter of 2028. Intel is a major partner.
Musk also said Terafab would probably have an economic value placing it in the top 20 of countries. Long term, the cost could exceed $100 billion, with machinery spending in the tens of billions through early 2028. The project was first announced in August with an initial investment of $16.8 billion.
Compute reliability
Musk also warned that getting GPUs running reliably is harder than it looks. Responding on X to a post about neocloud demand, he wrote that it only works "if they can get their compute online and reliable, which is extremely difficult to do at scale". South Korean neocloud Elice lost over 30% of its stock value after its IPO.
The same caution appears on robotics: Musk asked investors to "temper expectations" for Optimus, which is still far from truly useful for open-ended tasks. As seen with the early production at Fremont, the road remains long.
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