TLDR
- Drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame is nearly complete at Giga Texas, roughly six months after breaking ground.
- Concrete is already being poured on three upper floors while ground-level work continues simultaneously.
- Tesla has issued a new order of around 5,000 Optimus units to suppliers, its first mass production order at the thousand-unit level.
- Tesla is auditing its Optimus humanoid robot supply chain across multiple Chinese cities including Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Ningbo.
- The Texas facility targets high-volume Optimus production in summer 2027, while Fremont’s pilot line is already mass producing Gen 3 robots.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is in its final stretch of steel frame construction, according to drone footage posted Thursday by site observer Joe Tegtmeyer.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
In the video, Tegtmeyer noted that structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam. That puts the primary skeleton close to completion, roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
Tegtmeyer’s footage also shows concrete going in on three upper floors simultaneously while crews lay rebar and pour grade beam footings at ground level. Tesla used the same parallel scheduling approach at the original Giga Texas building to compress timelines.
The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus. The building will run nearly 4,000 feet in length alongside the existing vehicle factory.
Factory Audit and Mass Production Orders Signal Shift
Beyond the construction progress, there are signs Tesla is moving fast on the supply side too. Tesla has recently issued a new order of around 5,000 Optimus units to its suppliers. That is the first mass production order at the thousand-unit level, following earlier trial production orders of just a few hundred units.
At the same time, Tesla is actively auditing its Optimus supply chain in China, visiting suppliers across Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo, and Xiamen. Industry insiders say the combination of factory audits and new orders signals Optimus has moved from engineering prototype to replicable manufacturing.
Sitting alongside the Optimus factory on the same campus is Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant. It will supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Keeping robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate move to cut shipping time and supply chain delays between the two operations.
Tesla has not updated its timeline beyond the previously stated goal of bringing high-volume Optimus production online at the Texas site in summer 2027.
Fremont Running While Texas Builds
Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January. That plant is expected to build tens of thousands of units this year, primarily to generate real-world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up.
Elon Musk has set a long-term output target of 10 million Optimus units per year for the Texas facility at full capacity. That figure would far exceed the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at Fremont.
The Chinese supply chain companies receiving Optimus orders are mostly traditional manufacturers from home appliance and mechanical manufacturing sectors, including Sanhua Intelligent Control, Tuopu Group, and Xinjian Transmission.
Tesla’s 5,000-unit supplier order has been finalized, and the factory audit across Chinese supply chain partners is described as imminent.
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