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Morgan Stanley explains why Tesla’s first ‘Terafactory’ will be a perfect fit for Texas

The Cybertruck in off-road conditions. (Photo: humdinger_3d/Instagram)

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Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas believes that Tesla’s newest electric vehicle production facility will land in Texas. In an investor’s note on Monday, the analyst gave six key reasons for why he believes Texas will be Tesla’s newest home.

The upcoming facility is expected to be dedicated for the production of the Cybertruck, which will require a different manufacturing system compared to Tesla’s previous cars. The factory will be massive, and in the first quarter earnings call, Musk even mentioned that the Gigafactories will probably be referred to as “Terafactories” soon.

Following are Morgan Stanley’s reasons why Texas may very well be the site of the Cybertruck’s “Terafactory.”

Tesla’s need to join other manufacturers in states

Jonas recognizes that Tesla is the only Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) to have its main production facility in California. While Michigan has long been the home of the American automotive market, Tesla has called California home since its early days. Tesla is as much of a technology company as it is a carmaker, and technology lives in Silicon Valley.

However, Jonas sees unique disadvantages in having the main production facility located in CA. Concerning location and logistics, vehicle delivery times are extended for those who do not live in the western portion of the United States. Tesla owners who live on the East Coast are subjected to longer wait times for their vehicles due to transit and logistics delays. This is one of the main reasons a production facility that is centrally located in the country would be advantageous, Jonas says.

Texas has a hearty automotive manufacturing employment rate

Texas ranks fourth out of all fifty U.S. States in automotive manufacturing. This statistic comes from the US Department of Labor. Not only could Tesla increase its production rate as a company, but it could also provide a sizable economic boost by offering automotive production employment in a state that already has the enthusiasm for building vehicles.

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Texas’ relaxed labor union representation fits Tesla’s bill

Jonas believes Tesla would prefer to operate in a state with a labor union representation that is not as heavy. Texas is a right-to-work state, where labor costs are affordable. Considering that the facility will be responsible for producing Tesla’s first pickup, the Cybertruck, along with the Model Y crossover, the workload will require a hefty workforce. Tesla will likely be looking to save where it can in a state that won’t break the company’s budget, and in Texas, The cost of doing business is significantly less than California, Jonas said.

Texas is a hotspot for renewable energy

Jonas recognizes Tesla’s identification as an “integrated renewable energy generation, storage, and transportation company.” Tesla would likely prefer a state with an abundance of renewable solar energy that could sustainably drive its manufacturing operations. Texas is a state with a warm and sunny climate, making it perfect for solar energy. The Morgan Stanley analyst noted that the state’s predictable climate and weather outlook would be beneficial to Tesla.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX holds its operations in Boca Chica, Texas

SpaceX has held its operations in Boca Chica, Texas since 2012. While its main rocket facility is in Hawthorne, California, Boca Chica is where SpaceX chooses to launch some of its rockets. The site first launched a rocket on April 5, 2019. However, Jonas seems to believe that Musk’s comfortability with Texas and SpaceX could extend to Tesla. “Synergies in management time and, over time, possibly increased cooperation between Tesla and SpaceX make Texas an appealing option for the next U.S. Giga,” Jonas wrote.

Tesla’s presence in the heart of U.S. Oil and Gas is “symbolic”

Jonas and other Morgan Stanley investors said that U.S. lawmakers and the public might see a “symbolic and, in many ways, well-timed” investment by Tesla in Texas. The state has long been the heart of the United States’ oil and natural gas industry, and a sustainable energy company moving into Texas could be a hint toward the inevitable transition to clean energy.

While Tesla CEO Elon Musk has mentioned that the newest production facility is going to end up in the Central United States, there has been confirmation that Texas is indeed the definite the landing spot for the upcoming facility. However, Musk did use a Twitter poll to test the waters of Texas’ acceptance as the location of the newest factory, and the results were positive.

Both Musk and CFO Zachary Kirkhorn mentioned that the new production facility could be the company’s largest plant yet, hinting that it might be called a “Terafactory” instead. There is no indication of when Tesla will announce the facility’s final location. Still, Texas certainly seems like a very good fit for the Cybertruck facility.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big

SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.

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SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.

The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.

The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.

SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.

Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.

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Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.

The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.

Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.

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Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer

Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.

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Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.

On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.

Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.


Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.

Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.

The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.

The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.

Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.

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Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity

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Credit: SpaceX

SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.

Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.

The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.

The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.

Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.

Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.

For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.

While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.

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