Tesla Starts Optimus Production at Fremont, Plans Robot Training School

Tesla’s third-quarter earnings report listed the Fremont Optimus project as being in “Early Ramp,” moving from the construction stage. On the earnings call, Musk said most equipment for a planned 1 million-unit annual capacity line is in place, but reaching about 20,000 robots a week will take at least a year or longer. He described the ramp as an S-curve that would be slow and uneven at first because the robot is a complex new hardware product with thousands of components and processes that must work together.

Even with Optimus’s hands still unfinished, Musk plans to build 10,000 to 20,000 production-level robots. Rather than sending them immediately to work, Tesla intends to place them in a training program called Optimus Academy, where the robots will attempt varied tasks in simulation and in the real world. Data from those operations would train the next round of AI models, which would then be deployed back into the robots. Musk compared the approach to how children learn by interacting with the physical world.

Tesla expects to resolve major problems in Optimus’s AI capability, electromechanical design, reliability and service life around the end of 2027 and begin delivering robots to outside companies. The first commercial users are expected to be industrial customers taking on dangerous, repetitive or long-duration tasks, with homes as a later market. Tesla is also building a second-generation Optimus line at its Texas factory, with a long-term target of 10 million units a year.

The Fremont line’s conversion closes a chapter for Tesla. Model S began production there in 2012 and Model X followed in 2015. Musk announced in January that Model S and Model X production would end in the second quarter; after the last vehicles came off the line in May, the line was dismantled 46 days later. QbitAI reported that Tesla wanted to retire low-volume products, improve factory utilization and apply its car-making experience to a business Musk sees as larger.

Optimus still faces manufacturing and technical hurdles. The Information reported in September, according to QbitAI, that Tesla had accumulated more than 500,000 hours of robot training data and planned to double that by the end of the year. The Information also reported that Optimus output reached hundreds of units a week in August, up from dozens a week in the second quarter, but still far below Musk’s 20,000-a-week target. The robot’s hands and forearms contain more than 100 screws and other small parts, some assembled by hand, and tactile sensors have reliability issues.

Tesla AI chief Ashok said on the earnings call that watching football does not make a person good at playing it, and robots similarly need their own practice after learning from human demonstrations. Musk said Tesla may release a video in the next one or two months showing Optimus performing tasks autonomously without pre-scripted actions. Tesla also plans to integrate its next-generation AI5 chip into Optimus around April 2027, with computing power about 10 times that of AI4, according to the QbitAI report.