A $500 million, 2,500 home development project will come to the City of Austin located near Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas as the electric automotive plant is catalyzing employment in the area and bringing on a need for more housing.
Hines, a real estate development company based out of Houston, has plans to develop a $500 million housing community on 1,400 acres. The plot of land will be large enough to have 2,500 new houses and between 1,250 and 2,000 multifamily units. Mirador, the project’s name, will be developed in the southeastern portion of Austin, in a location within close proximity to Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas, as just a fifteen-minute drive will get you to the factory from your front door.
Dustin Davidson, a managing director for Hines, said that the influx of employment opportunities, especially Tesla’s new factory, have surged the market for Austin’s residential real estate. “Lots of employment opportunities coming; Tesla’s obviously the big one, but they’re just one of many, and we believe more will come,” Davidson said to the Austin Business Journal (via KXAN).
Hines announced details of the project on its website:
“Mirador will consist of 2,500 single-family lots, 50 acres of multi-family and townhomes (including attached, detached, duplexes, quadplexes) and 75 acres of commercial land. The development will continue a partnership with Gehan Homes and Lennar Homes, add David Weekley Homes, Highland Homes, MHI Homes, and will bring on more builders to in the future. Conveniently located off the 130 Toll and Highway 71, the community offers a suburban ambiance with easy access to the new Tesla Gigafactory, the Circuit of the Americas Formula One racetrack, as well as all the local restaurants, parks, live music venues and other attractions Austin offers in under 15 minutes. Plus, residents can make use of the convenient on-site amenities, such as the 60-acre lake, over 600-acres of greenbelt, community parks, extensive trails and swimming pool.”
Tesla’s Gigafactory Texas is expected to amend an area weakened by the COVID-19 pandemic. Travis County officials launched a “Declaration of Disaster” in March 2020, and Federal Reserve data showed a 10.2 percent spike in unemployment filings from April 2019 to April 2020. According to a presentation given by Tesla in June 2020, the automaker projected that its new plant would supply “5,000 middle-skill jobs that fit a targeted economic development need” and would directly contribute $600 million in annual sales activity. The factory was also expected to create 4,000 new non-Tesla jobs due to “secondary effects.”
Gigafactory Texas’ most recent estimates have projected at least 15,000 new jobs both directly and indirectly at the plant. As of October 2021, Tesla had already created 5,000 new jobs in Austin, the most that any company had created in 2021. Amazingly, Tesla has not received an approval certificate from the State that would allow it to build vehicles at the plant and deliver them to customers, yet it still created more jobs than any other company in the Austin area last year.
Tesla Giga Texas drive-bys show just how massive Elon Musk’s Cybertruck factory really is
Austin: America’s New Hot Spot
Austin has been one of the United States’ most heavily developed cities in the past several years. Tesla may be the biggest name to move its corporate headquarters to the City, but it is not the only company to establish a relatively drastic presence in the area. Google is investing $50 million in Texas this year to develop office space. Amazon is building a new 3.8 million square foot distribution center in nearby Pflugerville. Apple is building a $1 billion campus in north Austin and will move some of its employees to the area.
However, Tesla’s Factory seemed to spark the job creation, according to Austin-area realtor Paul Smith. “Once Tesla was announced, now all of a sudden you have job creation. That’s the one thing that it didn’t really have is, southeast Austin was kind of neglected for a little bit, right?” Smith said. The surge of corporate projects in the area has contributed to skyrocketing home costs. The neighborhood closest to Mirador had its average house price jump $93,000 from December 2020 to December 2021, Redfin data suggests.
The influx of economic growth, which has largely been fed by the vast number of projects and companies headed to the region, has largely fueled housing costs to skyrocket thanks to increased demand. More families will move to the Austin area in the coming years due to its attractiveness to corporations and large companies. Austin was ranked #1 on Zillow’s hottest housing market for 2021. In 2022, the City ranks 10th.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
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
