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Tesla partner Panasonic shares details of Gigafactory Nevada’s major expansion
It appears that Tesla’s battery partner, Panasonic, is preparing for a massive ramp in Gigafactory Nevada, with an executive stating that the Japanese firm will be rolling out a major expansion of its operations on the site. These include the installation of new equipment and the hiring of more workers, which would allow Giga Nevada to produce battery cells at higher rates than before.
Panasonic’s expansion was recently confirmed by Carl Walton, vice president of production engineering and facilities for Panasonic Energy of North America, who shared the updates in a conversation with the Reno Gazette-Journal. According to Walton, some of the expansion should take place within the next few months, and it will likely continue all the way to next year.
“There’s some construction work that needs to take place over the next couple of months. Then early next year, we’ll be installing new equipment with production starting shortly after that,” he said.
The additional capacity will be coming from a 14th battery production line that Panasonic will be adding to Giga Nevada. Walton declined to give the exact number of GWh that the planned expansion will add to the facility’s capacity, though he noted that Panasonic expects the facility’s capacity to increase by about 10% with the upgrades in place. It should be noted that currently, Gigafactory Nevada has a capacity of about 35 GWh per year.
Walton further noted that with the expansion in place, Panasonic will be hiring more employees for Giga Nevada. That being said, the executive noted that the planned hiring ramp will only include about 100 new positions, hinting at the possibility of the 14th line being heavily automated. “The expansion will increase our staffing by about 100 positions. We’re excited to continue our investment in the Northern Nevada community and our people here,” Walton stated.
While speaking with the Gazette-Journal, Walton added that the expansion plans for the Tesla site will not be limited to the new battery cell production line, since existing lines will also be receiving significant upgrades. These upgrades, the exec explained, are necessary to accommodate a new generation of battery cells. “That work is starting now and we’ve already started to convert current equipment to be able to make those batteries for us,” Walton remarked.
Interestingly enough, the Panasonic executive provided some details about the next-generation battery cells that will be produced at Gigafactory Nevada. According to Walton, Panasonic’s latest battery improves energy density by 5% compared to its previous cells. The company also claimed that its new cells are 1.4x denser than competing iron phosphate batteries, making them the world’s highest energy density batteries. These improvements are but a step, however, as Panasonic is reportedly looking to increase the energy density of its battery cells by 20%.
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Panasonic’s confirmation of its planned expansion in Gigafactory Nevada highlights the Japanese firm’s strong working relationship with Tesla. Last year, a report from the Nikkei Asian Review, which cited very little sources, alleged that Panasonic was freezing its expansion plans in Giga Nevada. Panasonic Chief Executive Officer Kazuhiro Tsuga also commented on Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s “unpredictable” behavior on Twitter. Musk, for his part, noted that Panasonic has been the reason behind Giga Nevada’s battery supply constraints.
With the recent statements from Walton, however, it appears that both companies now stand on much firmer ground. Panasonic’s expansion of its Gigafactory Nevada operations seems to be a strong strategy this year, after all, especially since its battery business in the Tesla facility has proven profitable even from January to March 2020, a time that is marred by the start of the pandemic. And with electric cars becoming more popular, the Japanese firm will likely have its hands full trying to meet the battery demand for Tesla’s electric vehicles.
Elon Musk’s massive Terafab project, which will be the first true conglomeration between each of his major entities, is set to get its final location soon, the CEO said on Tesla’s recent earnings call.
“The Terafab, we expect to announce a location soon, and provide more details about our plans in that regard. We’ll leave that to the product, the launch announcement rather than try to squeeze it into an earnings call,” Musk said last Wednesday.
Tesla Terafab set for launch: Inside the $20B AI chip factory that will reshape the auto industry
Terafab was announced by Musk back in March and was essentially a massive, vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing project that would provide all the chips the three companies needed for their AI initiatives without needing third-party companies.
The plant will produce over 1 terawatt of AI compute each year, and will help back up projects like Optimus, Full Self-Driving, and other AI-based projects that Musk’s companies are working on.
In April, less than a month after the project was launched, Intel announced it would join the project, contributing manufacturing expertise and consulting to Terafab as a whole. Intel is one of three chip manufacturers that produce sub-5 nanometer chips at scale. TSMC and Samsung are the other two.
However, there was no true indication of where Terafab would end up, but most believe it will likely be somewhere in Texas. Business Insider has reported that SpaceX plans to build out Terafab in Grimes County, Texas, but this is unconfirmed.
Musk confirmed recently that it would not be on Giga Texas property, as it is simply too large.
The sheer scale of TERAFAB is going to be insane.
Elon said it wouldn’t be suitable for anywhere on Giga Texas property because it’s too big:
“We couldn’t possibly fit the Terafab on the GigaTexas campus. It will be far bigger than everything else combined there.
Several… pic.twitter.com/79GbhNNuf4
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 23, 2026
Terafab holds much of Musk’s grand ambitions for the future within its construct. It holds so much responsibility for the future and the biggest projects that Musk’s companies can imagine.
“I think this is a very big announcement and it deserves to have its own day in the spotlight and not be squeezed into an earnings call,” he said. “I do think Terafab is going to be an amazing initiative and a necessary one, and one without which we will be constrained in our ability to scale Optimus production, because we simply won’t have enough AI chips.”
He continued by stating that Terafab is necessary for scaling Optimus, which Musk said could be the biggest product of any kind of all time. “It’s crucial to solve that, and we’ll have to solve memory, logic, and packaging in order to scale Optimus.”
SpaceX performed a secret test on a specific portion of Starship with its recent 13th test flight last week, CEO Elon Musk revealed.
Starship’s 13th test flight took place last Friday, and in many aspects, it was one of the most overwhelmingly successful launches in the project’s history.
All of the mission objectives were met without incident, both the Super Heavy Booster and Ship managed to perform safe splashdowns in the Gulf of America and the Indian Ocean, respectively, and the deployment of Starlink satellites came and went without any complications.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
However, there was more on the agenda for SpaceX with Flight 13. Musk revealed an internal test of the ship’s heat shield tiles, as the space exploration company wanted to push them to the limits after previous issues.
Many noticed that Starship’s initial launch seemed to be more accelerated than normal, and that was not a mistake. Musk revealed that SpaceX decided to give Flight 13 an intentionally aggressive acceleration rate in an effort to test how well the tiles would remain attached to the ship:
This flight intentionally had much higher acceleration to test how well the heat shield tiles would remain attached at high dynamic pressure.
Test was successful.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
SpaceX had issues with some of the heat shield tiles remaining attached early on in the Starship program. The first six test flights presented some kind of anomaly with them, so the company’s big focus with them was to figure out a way to keep them intact through the duration of the flight.
Things truly improved as Flight 10 showed that ceramic tiles generally stayed attached to the ship far better due to refined attachment, as SpaceX utilized pins instead of adhesives. Flights 10 through 13 truly showed some clear progress with the heat shield tiles, and this latest test seems to be where some real progress was noticed, especially by Musk.
The 13th Starship launch last Friday was the second with Starship V3, SpaceX’s latest and greatest iteration of the spacecraft. Goals and ambitions are getting even grander as the project continues to progress. Musk has already hinted that SpaceX will likely try to catch Starship with Flight 14.
Elon Musk
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.
Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.
Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.
Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions
He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.
20,000 Mile Tesla FSD Screen Streak!
Special thank you to @DevinOlsenn, @scotsrule08, & @OwenSparks for helping co drive during all these fun adventures these last couple of months
Also thank you to @wholemars for always tracking me along the journey verifying it all with his… pic.twitter.com/CZ2yO6Ev0X
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) July 27, 2026
It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.
The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.
Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.
Musk’s massive Terafab project will get final location soon
Elon Musk reveals SpaceX performed secret Starship test on Flight 13
