Investor's Corner
Tesla files to build EV batteries on new production lines at Fremont Factory
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has filed to build a new battery manufacturing equipment line at the Fremont Factory in Northern California. The factory, which Tesla purchased in 2010, is the only in the company’s lineup to produce all four models. It has not been known as a battery cell or pack manufacturing plant, as the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, produces those EV components. However, the filings indicate Tesla may be looking to slightly expand its cell manufacturing efforts with new production lines at Fremont.
Filed and signed by Tesla on August 30, the permit is labeled as “Tesla F21-0391-A – CTA Battery B-Build.” Tesla gives the following description of the project:
“NEW BATTERY MANUFACTURING EQUIPMENT LINE ON 2ND FLOOR OF MAIN ASSEMBLY BUILDING. THIS PERMIT APPLICATION RELATES TO THE MODULE PORTION OF THE LINE.”
The project is valued at $1.5 million, according to documents seen by Teslarati.
Credit: City of Fremont
Additionally, another application reveals a $1.3 million project that includes the installation of a new maintenance office, a storage area, production cells with equipment for hood, fender, and trunk lids, and offline cell manufacturing equipment. This project is listed to be on the first floor of the assembly building.
Interestingly, the Fremont Factory has been one of Tesla’s more spacially-confined facilities. Earlier this year, during a visit from Morgan Stanley analysts, including Adam Jonas, the firm noted the Fremont Factory was incredibly tight in terms of storage capacity and room in general. Despite running at a capacity of 20 percent above what has been considered its maximum. “The plant was never designed to produce 450k units (at its peak produced ~300k units before Tesla took it over from Toyota), which was immediately apparent at the tour, ” Jonas wrote in his note describing the visit. “Tesla does not shy away from the fact the plant is inefficiently designed with four assembly buildings, one of which is a tent that cars are assembled in,” referring to GA 4.5, which was made permanent last year.
Just two weeks prior to Morgan Stanley’s visit to Fremont, CEO Elon Musk stated Tesla was considering expanding Fremont “significantly.” While many of us just thought this likely meant an expansion of vehicle production alone, Musk may have been hinting toward an expansion of the manufacturing process altogether.
Tesla battery manufacturing efforts
Tesla has held battery supply deals with Panasonic, CATL, and LG Chem, but has also started building its own cells in-house. In 2020, Tesla unveiled its 4680 battery cell, which has already been prototype-tested by Panasonic. Tesla has been building the cell at the Kato Rd. facility just a few blocks away from Fremont’s front doors. However, the automaker has not scaled this cell to mass production as of yet, and Tesla could always use more battery cells.
-
With the 4680 cell not quite reaching mass production volumes yet, an order log that grows with what seems to be every minute, and a production volume that just simply has not caught up to Tesla’s demand, it would make sense to expand in-house battery manufacturing efforts as supplementary support.
“I think we’ve said this now for many years. I know has proven true. Tesla does not have a demand problem, we have a production problem. And we’ve almost always had it’s a very rare exception it’s always been a production problem,” Musk said after Q2. “I think that will remain the case.”
Rearranging at the Fremont Factory
Over the past month or so, Tesla has filed to make many significant changes at the Fremont Factory. After we reported on the construction efforts that are seemingly underway, Tesla has also been filing several applications with the City of Fremont for equipment repositioning, as well as the construction of new foundations and manufacturing equipment. Even things as simple as light poles are being repositioned to make way for potential new manufacturing buildings.
Tesla Fremont plant is abuzz with activity as nearby construction goes underway
Tesla has also started relocating Model S and X production equipment to other portions of the factory. “GASX,” which we can assume is “General Assembly Model S and X,” has had a hoist relocated, according to filings. Tesla has also filed to install production tools and other associated Model S and Model X manufacturing utilities in the factory. This does not necessarily imply that production lines for the two vehicles will be expanding, especially considering the vehicles make up an extremely small portion of Tesla’s overall sales. However, these manufacturing lines may be shifting to other locations at Fremont to make way for the perhaps imminent installation of cell manufacturing lines at Fremont.
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
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
-
The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
-
Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
-
The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
