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Tesla’s Elon Musk shuts the door on Gigafactory Texas talk, but for how long?
George Strait once said that all of his exes live in Texas, and maybe Elon Musk doesn’t want his new electric vehicle facility to be infiltrated by the country music legend’s past lovers.
Just kidding.
While we all patiently wait for Tesla’s CEO to announce the location of its next vehicle production plant, I was pretty sure that Texas had been confirmed as the spot. After seeing some reports, I dug a little deeper and found that the State of Texas had some records, including purchase price agreements, on a plot of land just outside of Austin.
However, when I reported the news, Elon responded and told us at Teslarati that the company had the option to buy the land, but they had not secured a purchase agreement and exercised its right to purchase the property.
I have to admit, I was pretty shocked. I have been following the situation closely for months, and it is pretty evident that Texas certainly has the most advantages. Not to mention, Elon definitely seems to be leaning toward it. He’s been talking about Texas since January, and we’ve already talked about the distinct advantages the state holds over any other location.
However, Musk wasn’t done there. He then added that Tesla was looking at several locations. I’m assuming Tulsa, Oklahoma, is also in the mix considering that has been a location that is very open to taking its oil roots and trading them in for a new electrified infrastructure that will create a string of sustainable transportation production lines in the state.
However, it is really evident that Tesla might be having some second thoughts on the Lone Star State…or are they?
First, let’s consider the details of the land plot in question in Texas. It’s 2,100 acres, its $5.2 million bucks, and its really perfect for what Tesla has wanted. We know that the new factory is set to be the biggest one yet because both Zachary Kirkhorn and Elon said they are going to start calling the factories “Tera” instead of “Giga.”
To put the size of the land into perspective, Fremont sits on 370 acres, Giga Shanghai on 210 acres, and Giga Berlin on 740 acres. This means the prospective Texas land plot is nearly three times as big as Giga Berlin, which is the factory that will produce Tesla cars for all of Europe, and it is all going to be used to create the Cybertruck and the Model Y.
We know the demand for the Cybertruck is enormous. The pre-order number is not officially public knowledge. Still, there is some indication that Tesla is getting near three-quarters of a million reservations for the truck and its tough, robust exterior.
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We know that Tesla wants to build the plant in the middle of the country. That could mean anything, from North Dakota to Texas literally, and it could go slightly West to Colorado, and slightly East to Missouri. That’s what is confusing.
Now that there are apparently “several locations” in the mix, the real question is: Why is the Texas deal taking so long? Is Tesla looking to negotiate an even lower price? I decided to dig a little more.
According to Texas A&M University’s “Texas Rural Land Prices” page, where the college has the price of land from Q4 1971 up until Q1 2020, the most recent cost of an acre of property in the state is $2,986. The prospective plot of land where Tesla could build its next factory is 2,100 acres. So the value of the property, according to these statistics, is $6,270,600. According to the application that Tesla and the State of Texas have, the land price that was agreed upon is $5,298,275, giving the company a nearly $1 million discount. It is about a 16% discount according to my handy, dandy calculator.
Texas has also announced its intentions to give the automaker a sweet incentive package to the tune of $68 million, according to reports. That’s a lot of scratch, and it could certainly help with the purchase price, the labor costs of constructing the building, and more.
It is just tough to say why the deal is taking a while. The Cybertruck’s Dual and Tri-Motor variants are going to be produced at the tail-end of 2021, and with Tesla’s track record with the Model Y in the US and the Model 3 in China, they’ll be built well before then. That would give Tesla, if the company started construction in July, 18 months to complete the Cybertruck portion of the factory. Fremont could handle Model Y production until the new factory’s Phase 2 is completed.
I am personally excited to see where the factory ends up, and I really, genuinely think that Texas is where the factory will end up.
Where do you think the factory will be when its all said and done? And why do you think Tesla is kind of dragging its feet through the purchase process?
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
