Tesla is no longer playing around with Optimus. A massive factory is under construction in Texas, targeting 10 million robots per year. The Optimus V3 will be unveiled by late summer 2026. And Elon Musk wants to sell these robots to the general public by end of 2027, priced between $20,000 and $30,000. The humanoid robotics world is about to shift.
To summarize
• Tesla is building a 5.2 million square foot factory in Texas to produce up to 10 million Optimus units per year.
• The Optimus V3 will be unveiled by late summer 2026, with public sales targeted for end of 2027 between $20,000 and $30,000.
• Tesla is deploying $25 billion in capex in 2026, nearly three times the amount spent in 2025.
A “special” robot that keeps waiting
On April 29, 2026, Elon Musk described the Optimus V3 as “special” on social media, without giving a precise unveiling date.
The lack of details is not accidental. Tesla is deliberately keeping specifications under wraps. “We’re also a little hesitant to show V3 off because we find our competitors do a frame-by-frame analysis whenever we release something and copy everything they possibly can”, Musk explained during the April 22 analyst call.
The strategy is clear: show as little as possible until the last moment.
An unveiling had originally been planned for Q1 2026. It was pushed back. Musk now indicates the robot “will be ready to show up by the middle of this year”, with a public demonstration potentially coinciding with the start of large-scale production, possibly by late summer.
In the meantime, the Optimus pilot production line at Tesla’s Fremont, California factory is already targeting one million robots per year. That is just the starting point.
The Texas factory that changes everything
The real signal came from an aerial photograph.
In its Q1 2026 report, Tesla shared an image of a plot of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, clearly labeled “Optimus factory site preparation”. This is no longer a project on paper. The construction equipment is already there.
Permit documents confirm the scale of the project. Tesla is seeking to add more than 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by end of 2026, at an estimated investment of $5 to $10 billion. The long-term production target for this facility: 10 million Optimus units per year.
To put that in perspective, Giga Texas already spans 2,500 acres with more than 10 million square feet of existing factory floor. What is being built now will effectively double the physical capacity of the site.
Texas was chosen for precise strategic reasons. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs compared to California, and above all the immediate proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, located at Giga Texas and now totaling more than 230,000 H100-equivalent GPUs. The software and the hardware will be developed on the same campus, a major operational advantage.
The North Campus will also house Terafab, the Tesla/SpaceX/xAI joint venture for chip manufacturing, a Cybercab test track, and dedicated road infrastructure. And the AI5 chip, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field, was just finalized in April 2026.
A colossal market, a stock under pressure
Musk’s ambition does not stop at the factory.
At the World Economic Forum in January 2026, he announced that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027, priced between $20,000 and $30,000. His long-term vision goes further: “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” His own estimate of global long-term demand exceeds 20 billion units, across both consumer and industrial use cases.
To fund this trajectory, Tesla is committing enormous sums. The 2026 capex is now expected to reach $25 billion, up from the $20 billion initially communicated and nearly three times the $9 billion deployed in 2025. This acceleration keeps free cash flow in negative territory and is creating real pressure on investors.
Q1 2026 results illustrate this tension. Earnings per share of $0.41 beat Wall Street expectations, set at $0.39. But quarterly revenue of $22.39 billion came in below projections of $22.96 billion, despite year-over-year growth of 15.8%.
TSLA stock has lost approximately 16% since the start of the year and 13% since the April 22 earnings release. The stock remains well below its 52-week high of $498.83. The consensus among 41 analysts sits at “Hold”, with a mean price target of $398.42. Wedbush maintains its “outperform” with a $600 target, Canaccord rates it “buy” at $450. But insiders have sold $20.8 million worth of stock over the past 90 days.
Tesla’s bet is clear: spend aggressively today to dominate a market that barely exists yet. If Optimus delivers on its promises, the investment will be justified. If timelines slip again, the market’s patience will have limits.
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