Tesla nears completion of steel frame for Optimus plant in Texas
English translation from Unibot. Source published 2026-09-21.
Construction of the Optimus plant at Gigafactory Texas is nearing completion - the steel frame is almost complete. This is evidenced by drone footage posted by Joe Tegtmeyer observing the construction site.
At the time of filming, workers remained to install approximately five column blocks up to the northern perimeter beam. But work on the North Campus site began at the end of March - about six months have passed.
The video captures serious progress on the building's shell. True, the equipment inside is not visible: no production lines, no cells for assembling robots, no test systems.
Concrete and steel run parallel
Concrete is being poured on the top three floors, while below crews continue to knit reinforcement and lay foundation beams, writes Teslarati. Tesla has already used a similar scheme during the construction of the main Giga Texas building: steel is installed in one place, concrete is poured in another.
The Optimus plant is part of a larger North Campus expansion of over 5.2 million square feet. The campus will eventually stretch more than 4,000 feet, Tesla says. This is almost the length of a functioning automobile plant, only narrower.
The company did not announce new dates. For now, the previous goal remains in force - to launch mass production of Optimus in Texas in the summer of 2027. But even with the finished frame, the building still needs to be sheathed, utilities installed, equipment installed, and commissioning carried out.
Release plans are on the verge of fantasy
Elon Musk has a long-term goal of 10 million Optimus units per year at the Texas site at full capacity. This is ten times the planned capacity of the individual million-unit pilot line at the Fremont plant. However, none of these figures in the report are supported by real production data.
According to Teslarati, the line in Fremont has been mass-producing the current Tesla Gen 3 humanoid robot since January. They expect to assemble tens of thousands of units within a year. These machines are needed primarily to collect data from the real world - they will be used to hone software while Texas production is just accelerating.
Drone footage provides a rare opportunity to look at the construction site from the outside and evaluate the schedule. But it doesn't answer the main question: is the Optimus production process itself ready for mass production? The nearest announced deadline is the start of production in Texas in the summer of 2027.