Tesla has begun building its Optimus humanoid robot at its Fremont, California factory, according to an August 27 report from The Motley Fool. Optimus is a two-legged, human-sized robot Tesla is developing to perform manual tasks in factories and, eventually, homes. Production is running on the same line that used to build the Model S and Model X, which Tesla stopped manufacturing earlier this year and later converted for Optimus, a shift GetTesla covered in July when Tesla was still anticipating a production start.
Tesla’s own account of the ramp comes from its second-quarter 2026 financial results, released July 22, and the earnings call that followed. On that call, CEO Elon Musk described Optimus as the most difficult product Tesla has ever tried to scale. “The production scaling challenge is very substantial. The hardest product to scale, the hardest one they’ve ever made at Tesla,” Musk said, according to a transcript published by Shacknews. He attributed the difficulty to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts, most of which required Tesla to build a new supply chain rather than adapt an existing one for electric vehicles.
Musk has repeatedly cautioned that early output will be slow. A summary of the Q2 earnings call notes Tesla expects the initial ramp to follow a flat, gradual curve rather than a fast scale-up, since a bottleneck in any one of the 10,000 parts can slow the entire line. That caution is consistent with Tesla’s own track record on this project: an August 20 Electrek report noted that Tesla had already pushed back an earlier, more specific production window and that Musk had acknowledged no Optimus units were yet doing productive work inside Tesla’s own operations.
The first robots off the Fremont line are going into what Tesla calls “Optimus Academy,” an internal program that puts early units to work on routine tasks inside Tesla’s own factories rather than shipping them to customers. The idea is to use that real-world floor time to refine the robot’s software and hardware before Tesla scales up output further. Tesla has also continued construction on a dedicated Optimus facility at Gigafactory Texas, intended for a later version of the robot built around parts designed to be easier to manufacture than the current Fremont design.
For Tesla owners, the news does not change anything about buying, financing, or servicing a car. Optimus is a separate product, built in a separate part of the factory, with no announced price or delivery date for outside buyers. For shareholders and factory-adjacent readers, the update answers a narrower question: the space once used to build the Model S and Model X is no longer sitting idle or merely under construction. It is now producing robots, even if Tesla itself says that output will start small and grow slowly as the company works through a parts list, and a supply chain, it has never had to manage before.
Photo by Hyundai Motor Group via Pexels.
Photo by Hyundai Motor Group.