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Tesla’s next Gigafactory location unknown, but all signs point toward India
In May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric automaker would likely announce its next Gigafactory location by year’s end.
While there have been rumors of deep talks in Spain, numerous meetings with French government officials, and heavy speculation regarding a relationship with Canada, Indonesia, and South Korea, it is becoming overwhelmingly clear that all signs are pointing toward India, a location where Tesla has mulled a factory for several years.
It all started back in 2015 when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Musk had their first meeting at the Fremont Factory in Northern California.
At the time, Tesla was still a young-and-scrappy car company, pushing out just thousands of units each year as it only offered the Model S and Model X at the time. Electric vehicles were still a far cry from what they are today, and while there were other options on the market, gas-powered options still dominated the overall market.
Fast-forward to 2018, when Tesla decided to open its first vehicle production factory outside of the United States in Shanghai. The Chinese EV production plant quickly became Tesla’s most effective, accumulating thousands of workers and producing a majority of the automaker’s annual volume. It went from a domestic production facility for Chinese customers to an “export hub” that would feed some of the best-selling EVs to the European market.
This all happened before Tesla would commit to building a factory near Berlin in 2019, and then another factory in Mexico in 2023.
In 2021, Tesla seemed primed to announce it would make a substantial investment in India. It had a team of executives lined up, which included David Feinstein, Tesla vet who would be named Director of Global Trade and New Markets. Vaibhav Taneja was assigned as the Chief Accounting Officer for the India plant, and Prashanth R. Menon assumed the role of Director of Tesla India.
The team was even rounded out with Manuj Khurana for Policy and Development, Nishant Nishant for Charging Infrastructure, and Chithra Thomas for Human Resources. Samir Jain was set to take over India’s Service Operations for Tesla after seven years at Porsche, where he headed Aftersales for the German automaker’s operations in India.
However, the team Tesla would put together for India would never get to work in the market, as it was set to establish the plant there.
Tesla had certain demands it needed to fulfill before committing to a Gigafactory there, and India had certain demands it needed to fulfill before giving Tesla what it wanted.
Tesla’s ‘challenges’ with India gov’t halt potential rescue of $27B manufacturing initiative
India has some of the highest import duties on vehicles in the world. The taxes would double the price of any car priced over $40,000 and 60 percent to any car under that threshold. Because of this, Tesla requested import duties be reduced to 40 percent, which would help the company determine if demand for its cars was high enough to move forward.
If Tesla is able to succeed with imported vehicles, then a factory in India is quite likely.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 23, 2021
However, Indian officials were reluctant to oblige to Tesla’s demands, arguing that “company-specific” duty rollbacks would not be possible.
The government has made its stance against company-specific incentives clear,” government officials from India said. “This also applies for one particular company requesting industrywide changes to existing policy. Over the past four years, multiple demands were made by a large US-based firm to open up the market at lower import duties as well. Now, they locally produce in India and are ramping up capacity.”
India has a $27B manufacturing initiative called “Make In India,” which encourages companies from all corners of the globe to develop, produce, and assemble products in India with sizeable investments. This initiative was first introduced in 2014 by Modi.
Because Tesla would be importing vehicles from other countries, most likely China, into India’s marketplace, government officials were unfavorable of the idea of rolling back duties. However, they were willing to do so, only if Tesla would commit to building the factory in the first place, which completely eliminated the purpose of testing demand in the first place.
Two years later, it appears Tesla and India have come to some kind of agreement. Although the terms of a partnership or investment are unknown currently, both Modi and Musk have put forth statements that seem to indicate Tesla’s next factory will be in India.
“I am confident Tesla will be in India, and we’ll do so as soon as humanly possible,” Musk said. “Hopefully, we’ll be able to announce something in the not-too-distant future.”
We don’t want to jump the gun on an announcement,” he added, “but it’s quite likely that there will be a significant investment and relationship in the future.”
#Breaking | ELON MUSK SPEAKS TO REPUBLIC
Elon Musk speaks to Republic after meeting PM Modi, announces he and Tesla are coming to India pic.twitter.com/x2CxFEDM2Z
— Republic (@republic) June 20, 2023
Modi also posted his own photo with Musk on his Twitter account, thanking the Tesla CEO for a “great meeting.”
Great meeting you today @elonmusk! We had multifaceted conversations on issues ranging from energy to spirituality. https://t.co/r0mzwNbTyN pic.twitter.com/IVwOy5SlMV
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) June 21, 2023
Because of the widespread speculation regarding Tesla’s next factory, we can all speculate on where it will end up. But if there is any indication of what the automaker wants and what the government wants, the long-standing attempts to get a deal done may indicate Tesla is most likely to end up in India.
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Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi service hours by pushing the time back by one hour, keeping the ride-hailing service operational until 11 p.m., one hour later than previously.
CEO Elon Musk confirmed the change and offered a specific reason the expansion has been gradual: the system still needs to reliably avoid small pets that are difficult to see after dark, as they commonly blend into the color of the road, especially when they’re grey.
The latest adjustment restores only a fraction of the operating window the service once held. When paid Robotaxi rides began in Austin on June 22, 2025, vehicles ran from 6 a.m. to midnight.
In September 2025, Tesla lengthened the day to a 2 a.m. close, producing a 20-hour window that stayed in place for most of the following year. By early August of this year, the cutoff had already been pulled back; an August 26 update formalized hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. across Austin and several other markets.
The October move to 11 p.m. therefore leaves the Austin day one hour shorter than the original launch schedule and three hours shorter than the 2025 peak.
Musk addressed the constraint directly after the announcement. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
Robotaxi operating hours moved from 10pm to 11pm.
The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The example points to a low-contrast perception problem in which a small animal can blend into the road surface under limited lighting.
Tesla’s vehicles rely on cameras and neural-network processing rather than lidar; Musk has previously argued that advanced vision software can extract useful information even in low light by analyzing photon counts, but the pet-detection case remains the stated limiter in later hours.
The modest schedule change arrives alongside faster growth in the purpose-built Cybercab fleet. Texas registration data tracked by observers showed the Austin Cybercab count rising sharply in recent weeks, reaching 169 vehicles after more than 100 were added in a short span.
Tesla has indicated that a broader shift toward 24-hour operation is tied to the upcoming FSD v15 software release expected this month on Robotaxi vehicles. Until that capability is validated for the edge cases Musk described, the company continues to add service time incrementally rather than jumping straight to overnight coverage.
The one-hour extension gives Austin riders a later option for evening trips while the underlying detection work continues.
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
Tesla reveals early Robotaxi charging strategy, showing scrappy DNA
