IT News on October 22nd: Tesla's financial report for the third quarter of 2026 shows that the company has already started production of Optimus Prime (Optimus) humanoid robots on one of the mass production lines at its Fremont factory. However, CEO Elon Musk (Elon Musk) stated that it will still take about a year or even longer for this production line to reach the target capacity of 20,000 robots per week.
In its business update report for the third quarter of 2026, Tesla stated that the robots launched in Fremont are among the first Optimus models to meet mass production standards, and that the current manufacturing process is now capable of supporting the production of commercial products.
Tesla took only 46 days to dismantle the production lines at its Fremont factory that were previously used for manufacturing Model S and Model X, making space available for the production of Optimus Prime.
Recently, Musk admitted that the Optimus project still faces many challenges, including technical difficulties with the robotic arms, as well as limitations in the supply of rare earth magnets from China.
During the financial report conference call on Wednesday, Musk stated that Tesla has "initiated the early production phase I mentioned on the mass production line in Fremont," and that "the vast majority of the equipment for this million-unit production line" has already been in place.
"I estimate that it will take us at least a year, or perhaps a little longer, to achieve an annual production capacity of 20,000 units per week," Musk said. He mentioned that there are approximately 10,000 details that need to be fully debugged. Since Optimus is a "disruptive new product," the progress in the initial stages of increasing production capacity has been slow and full of setbacks.
IT Home noticed that Musk also mentioned that Tesla plans to integrate the Tesla AI5 chip into the Optimus robot. If everything goes well, the related work is expected to be completed by next April. The computing power of this chip far exceeds that of AI4, and Tesla has reduced the memory configuration of AI5 for the use cases of Optimus.
Elon Musk expects that Tesla will be able to resolve the remaining design, reliability, and lifespan issues of this robot by the end of 2027, at which point Optimus Prime will be available for external supply. He stated that the early applications of the robot will be focused in the industrial sector, mainly for high-risk, repetitive tasks that need to be carried out around the clock.
Musk stated that prior to this, Tesla was preparing to release a video showing Optimus completing tasks that were not pre-programmed. The related video is not expected to be available for another one or two months.
"I still firmly believe that Optimus will become the largest product on a global scale," Musk said. With the Fremont factory coming online and a second Optimus factory under construction in Texas, the next challenge for Tesla is to prove its ability to produce stable and reliable humanoid robots on a large scale.
