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Xpeng looks to generate $300 million in funding before U.S. IPO

Credit: Xpeng Motors

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Xpeng Motors is looking to rally around $300 million in funding prior to its United States’ initial public offering (IPO), sources said.

Of the companies and investors who are looking to get involved in the funding round, one of the most notable is the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), which is the country’s sovereign wealth fund.

According to French media outlet Nouve L’obs, the QIA currently holds about a 17% stake in Volkswagen Auto Group, Porsche, and mining company Glencore, which holds a cobalt deal with Tesla for the Giga Shanghai and Giga Berlin production plants.

Xpeng is looking to raise $300 million. However, CNBC reported that the final number the Chinese automaker raises could be higher than that as some investors are still discussing the possibility of putting money into the company. The sources wished to remain anonymous, and Xpeng declined to provide a comment on the matter.

The company’s latest round of investments is apart of the same $500 million funding round it raised earlier in July. Firms such as Hong Kong-based Aspex, New York-located Coatue, Beijing’s Hillhouse Capital, and Sequoia Capital China took part in the fundraising round.

Xpeng also raised $400 million in November, led by Xiaomi, a Chinese smartphone manufacturer.

The company has officially filed for an IPO in the United States in a confidential manner, but it has not decided which exchange it will list on yet, the sources said to CNBC.

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Xpeng has decided to enter the U.S. market at an interesting time. Not only did the U.S. Senate pass legislation that would increase the scrutiny of Chinese-based companies that trade on Wall Street, but a company employee also has an ongoing lawsuit with California’s Tesla, which is the outright leader in electric vehicle technology and development.

California Democratic Representative Brad Sherman spoke on the Chinese stock market restrictions. “As we continue to experience the economic fallout and volatility caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to protect main street investors is all the more important,” he said. “For too long, Chinese companies have disregarded U.S. reporting standards, misleading our investors.”

Additionally, Tesla opened a lawsuit against Xpeng employee Cao Guangzhi earlier this year, accusing the engineer of stealing Autopilot’s source code. Tesla alleges that the former employee downloaded Autopilot source code to his personal computer and transferring it to Apple Airdrop before selling it to Xpeng for financial gain.

Despite the two ongoing issues, Xpeng plans to begin offering an IPO for potential investors shortly. The company also is delivering its P7 sedan in China, which will directly compete with the Tesla Model 3, which has been highly popular in the country since it started deliveries in January.

If Xpeng does go public on Wall Street, it will be the third Chinese electric car company to offer trading in the United States. Currently, NIO and Li Auto are active in the U.S. stock market.

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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Musk’s massive Terafab project will get final location soon

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Credit: SpaceX

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.

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Musk confirmed recently that it would not be on Giga Texas property, as it is simply too large.

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.

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“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.”

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Elon Musk reveals SpaceX performed secret Starship test on Flight 13

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Credit: SpaceX

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.

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:

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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.

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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.

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Tesla FSD 14.3 [Credit: TESLARATI)

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.


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.

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