Tesla has officially started building Optimus robots. During Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call on Wednesday, Elon Musk said the company has “started what I’d call early production on a high-volume line in Fremont.”
Tesla says in its Q3 shareholders’ deck that “the bots coming off this line are the first production quality bots that we have manufactured,” and that its manufacturing process is suitable for a commercial product.
Optimus Production Kicks Off at Fremont
The line sits in space Tesla freed up by tearing down the Model S and Model X assembly lines at Fremont this summer, a job it finished in just 46 days. Musk said “the vast majority” of the line, which is planned for 1 million units per year, has already landed. An even larger line capable of 10 million units per year is planned for Giga Texas. Tesla is launching production with its Optimus Gen 3 design. Gen 3 was always supposed to be the first to go into mass production, but Tesla plans to graduate to Gen 4 by the time capacity comes online at Giga Texas.
Musk was careful to set expectations, though. He described Tesla’s Optimus output as an S-curve whose early part “has a shallow slope and is somewhat bumpy because it is such a radically new product.” He expects it will take at least a year to reach a rate of 20,000 units per week, largely because parts of the Optimus design are still changing.
When Optimus Will Reach Customers
Musk expects the remaining issues with Optimus’ AI, electromechanical design, reliability, and durability to be solved around the end of next year. That’s when Tesla plans to start delivering Optimus to other companies.
The first customers will likely be industrial, using Optimus for dangerous, repetitive tasks that need to run around the clock. Robots for the home will come later as production scales. “I remain convinced that Optimus will be the biggest product on Earth,” Musk said.
AI5 Upgrade and a Real-World Demo
Musk said Tesla may release an Optimus video in a month or two. He wants it to showcase the robot doing tasks that aren’t pre-programmed, rather than a canned demo. Tesla previously delayed the Optimus Gen 3 unveil for “finishing touches,” and a recent app leak revealed its production design, featuring cleaner joint covers and human-like hands with 22 degrees of freedom. A recent patent also describes flexible touch sensors that bring feeling to Optimus’ hands.
The next big milestone is adding Tesla’s upcoming AI5 chip to Optimus, which Musk expects around April 2027. AI5 is expected to deliver 5x the compute of a full two-chip AI4 computer, which Musk said Optimus needs to handle far more degrees of freedom than a car. Tesla’s AI5 chip entered trial production at Samsung’s Texas fab last month, with mass production slated for next year.
Optimus may finally be in production, but don’t expect to buy one anytime soon. Even if Musk’s timeline holds, the first external (and industrial) customers won’t start getting robots until the end of 2027.
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