#Tesla

Humanoids Summit organizer Modar Alaoui has spilled the beans on Tesla's secret Optimus plans in an interview with The San Francisco Standard. What he says Tesla told him: Optimus reservations will be timed to launch with his summit (Dec 1-2), or in the days right after. Tesla is a key partner of the event this year and plans to demo the Optimus V3 and showcase its self-driving cars there. What Alaoui expects on top of that: consumer reservations open in early December (a first for the public), the first shipment being the V3 since the prior gen was mainly a prototype, and most robots going to companies with only a small number set aside for consumers, at an expected $20,000+.

The American Dynamism 50 is a16z's annual list of companies building for America's future. This year's edition covers the industrial base end to end, from the inputs that come out of the ground to factories that make things and systems that deter conflict. a16z's Erin Price-Wright and Connor Love join Elena Burger to break down this year's list and its theme, Production is Deterrence, built around a simple idea: "You don't have a defense industrial base without an industrial base." 0:50 From mines to factories and systems 3:05 How the internet and nuclear was built 5:05 Drones built DJI into a robotics giant 6:50 Defense dollars pay for new factories 8:30 SpaceX and Tesla lessons on scale 10:15 How Mariana runs a mine on software 12:20 "AI cannot turn a wrench yet" 14:10 Retooling in 20 mins, not 3 months 17:45 Startups build before Pentagon asks 20:35 Why hard tech can be more valuable 24:45 The race for the biggest American flag 28:25 How defense parts unlock US robotics 32:05 The rise of the "manufacturing middle" 37:25 Anduril and SpaceX founder mafias 41:05 Private capital: USA's edge over China 46:30 The buildout must hit Middle America YouTube: https://youtu.be/cRJ7CfaK1Vc @espricewright @ConnorLoveCA @VirtualElena

The 2026 American Dynamism 50 is here: our annual list of 50 companies, from within the a16z portfolio and beyond, building for America's future. This year's theme is Production is Deterrence. "America's ability to prevent conflict depends on what it can build, how fast it can deliver, and how long it can keep going." A new generation of defense companies is moving from prototypes to full-scale production, and the industrial base has to keep pace. This year's list is organized around three pillars: 1. Systems: the drones, ships, missiles, aircraft, and spacecraft that deter conflict. 2. Factories: the plants, tools, and software that build them. 3. Inputs: the materials and power they're made of and run on. Get all three right, and the impact reaches well beyond defense, to skilled jobs, revitalized communities, and the supply chains behind energy, housing, and everyday goods. Meet all 50: https://www.a16z.news/p/ad-50-2026-production-is-deterrence

Tesla’s Optimus training regime leak. Workers in its Palo Alto R&D facility have been holding “robot university” for many months already. Press got it wrong when they said it just started up. Workers are wearing 24 lb suits with up to 40 cameras and grids of 3D sensors. To capture very detailed video and 3D fields of whatever the worker does. There are multiple configurations. They are given different tasks to do. They don’t know where the tasks come from. Multiple squads are working on three shifts 24 hours a day. Similar efforts were seen at the Texas factory. The data collection effort is immense. A Tesla car only has nine cameras. This leads to a data flywheel that is orders of magnitude more data than the car captured. Separate teams are capturing home data, like making a sandwich, while other teams capture jobs on factory floor, like installing HVAC systems in cars. Elon isn’t playing around. I can’t tell you how I learned this.

Tesla's Q3 earnings deck: "Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines. The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured. While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product."

Tesla's Q3 earnings deck: "Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines. The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured. While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product."

Tesla's Q3 earnings deck: "Optimus production began in Fremont on our high-volume lines. The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured. While we will continue to iterate on the hardware and manufacturing process, we have proven that the current manufacturing process for Optimus is suitable for a commercial product."

Old friends are the best friends. Jensen rocks. The Star Mind computer being co-engineered by SpaceX and Nvidia is far better than almost anyone expects and will reach volume production next year. Working with the incredibly talented Nvidia engineering team is pure joy!

Giga Texas Optimus factory construction update with 2 short video clips, one 360 at medium-altitude & a closer, lower flight showing tight views of the main steel structure! Ground work started in late March, with 1st steel on May 27. By 1 October, the frame was nearly at the north grade beam, large sections of upper floors were poured, & roofing insulation is arriving. The E side & the entire S half of the foundation have footings & grade beams, but no steel yet. The basic steel structure is ~ 40% assembled so far. This is the dedicated high-volume 7+ million sq ft (~ 650,000 sq m) Gen 4 Optimus plant. @Tesla has not given a standalone cost, but 2026 company capex was guided at ~ $20–25 billion for AI, robotics, & factory expansion; outside estimates put the broader N Campus at ~ $5–10 billion. This is in addition to the Fremont California Optimus plant (which is the Gen 3 pilot line) is sized at ~ 1 million units a year, expected to begin production in late 2026. The Giga Texas plant is 10X larger & has a planned capacity of ~10 million robots a year at full scale (a long-term ceiling, not the startup rate). The current target for limited initial production is late 2027. What is still ahead for construction over the next 6 to 8 months? Electrical conduit, water & sewage pipes, fire-water loop, storm water management drainage & underground pipes, exterior walls, roofing, ground slab & upper floor concrete & mechanical rough-in then equipment deliveries & installation. As you can see, lots of progress already, but there is a lot left to do before production line setup can happen.

We cut our RAM in half for the Tesla AI5 chip (now 72GB of LP5) and 1/3 for AI6 (now 144GB of LP6). This was the only way to get enough volume for Optimus production and greatly reduces cost. As it turns out, we think this will have a negligible effect on Optimus performance, as memory bandwidth is a bigger limiting factor than total memory storage (bandwidth was held constant).

🫶Tesla posts new Optimus hand job.

In formation

🚨Tesla AI is hiring for the Optimus Hand job. This position will lead the architecture, design, prototyping, validation, industrialization, and mass production of the hand hardware subsystem.

A fitting analogy for the pace at which Tesla has been making progress over the years is that of a Formula One car, whose peak acceleration increases in proportion to its speed as a result of enhanced traction generated by aerodynamic downforce. Our goal is to get Optimus to high-volume production as fast as possible. If your passion is designing drive systems, electronics, sensors, dynamic harness, cameras, body or hand structures and you want to overcome micron tolerancing challenges, and accelerate the scalability of humanoid robot manufacturing, this is the opportunity for you! You will learn a ton and make a huge impact! Apply here: https://www.tesla.com/careers/search/?site=US&query=optimus

.@elonmusk told me he plans to build “Optimus Academy” to train an army of humanoid robots. > “millions of simulated robots in the simulated world” > “tens of thousands of robots in the real world, to close the simulation to reality gap.” Why? There’s two big differences between the way Tesla will train humanoid robots and the way it built Full Self-Driving. - FSD only requires learning three degrees of freedom: turning, accelerating, braking … and a humanoid robot has to learn how to coordinate 50+ joints. - You can sell a Tesla without FSD, which allows you to collect the millions and millions of hours of driving data needed to bootstrap your model ... but you can’t sell an Optimus that hasn’t learned how to do stuff yet. The Optimus Academy is Elon’s attempt to build the data flywheel that Tesla got for free with FSD.