Tesla

Tesla just tripled its annual capital expenditure to $25 billion in 2026, up from $8.5 billion last year. The money is going into AI infrastructure, chip design, semiconductor research, battery technology, and Optimus robot production. The Fremont factory, which used to make Model S and Model X, is being converted to manufacture Optimus at scale. A dedicated Optimus plant is also being built near Austin. To put the number in context, Musk noted Amazon is spending $200 billion in capex this year and Google $175 billion. The scale gap is real, but the direction is the same. ...

Humanoid robots going mainstream is one of those things that feels like it is always five years away. But reading this, I got genuinely excited. Tesla thinks it has found its shortcut and the answer is Shanghai. Allan Wang Hao, Tesla China’s president, called the Gigafactory a “golden key” for scaling Optimus production. And when you look at the numbers it is hard to argue. The Shanghai plant pushed out 851,000 electric vehicles in 2025, more than half of everything Tesla made globally. The supply chains, the assembly lines, the engineering muscle, it is all already there. Tesla wants to point that same machine at a humanoid robot with 40 degrees of freedom and see what happens. ...