Tesla Facilities

[Yazata]

Ground clearing and site preparation north of Tesla's existing factory in Austin. Talk is that this will be the first installment of Terafab. Not the whole thing, which will have to occupy a much larger site and consume something like 10% of all the existing electric power in Texas (it will have to have its own power plants). If this really is a Terafab site, then it will just be a prototype chip foundry for small-scale production and testing of cutting-edge new chip designs.

There are still lots of questions, not only about where the mass-production plant will be located. There are questions about hiring the world's best semiconductor people, which is already underway. There are questions about sourcing the necessary microlithography machines which are hard to come by. I believe that Elon plans to manufacture them in-house, which just adds another level of difficulty.

But whatever happens, it's fascinating to watch. I'm very pleased to see that it isn't just imagination and talk, that there are actually signs on the ground that it's becoming real very quickly.

(Drone photo by Joe Tegtmeyer)

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[Yazata]

The new Optimus robot factory site preparation continues to progress at a site that's referred to in the Texas permitting documents as "Texas North Campus Manufacturing'. People are already exclaiming about the inbeds on the right side middle. While there might be a problem with the soil there (too soft or something) consensus seems to be that some kind of very heavy machinery will be installed there.

(Photo by Joe Tegtmeyer)

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Closeup of the inbeds. Joe Tegtmeyer notes that at least three grade levels are visible. Others comment that this seems awfully heavy-duty for manufacturing robots.

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[Syne]

Jeez. Even just the cost of a concrete floor over at least 22 acres is mind boggling.

A 22-acre concrete floor is an massive commercial-scale project (approximately 958,320 square feet). Based on 2026 data, a basic, non-reinforced 4-inch concrete slab typically costs between $4 and $8 per square foot.

For a project of this magnitude, the total estimated cost ranges from $5.7 million to over $11.5 million for a basic slab, and could exceed $20 million for higher-performance flooring.
- Gemini

[Yazata]

Joe Tegtmeyer's latest photo of Cortex.2 at the Austin Texas Tesla campus. This is one of the world's largest super computers, used for training Tesla automobiles to drive themselves. The white boxes in the foreground are Tesla megapacks, large stationary batteries to provide the computer with a stable electricity supply. I'm not sure what the buildings in the background are.

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[Yazata]

The Optimus robot factory is coming along nicely

(Photo by Joe Tegtmeyer)

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