A Tesla car is being charged at a Tesla electrical vehicle charging station in Norheimsund, Norway.
Photo: Getty Images
Elon Musk said Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, will be its “biggest product ever.” But first, the company must build nearly the entire supply chain needed to make it.
“This is going to be the hardest product to scale manufacturing that we’ve ever made at Tesla because everything on the robot is new,” Musk told investors during Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call Wednesday.
Unlike electric cars, which can use established suppliers for wheels, mirrors, glass, and body panels, Optimus has no ready-made supply chain, Musk said.
Tesla must develop suppliers or manufacture components itself.
It also lacks enough AI chips to scale production and must solve constraints involving memory, logic, and chip packaging.
Musk said suppliers are beginning to fill some of those gaps.
Samsung and TSMC are investing tens of billions of dollars in semiconductor factories that could support Optimus and Robotaxi, he said, while Micron has given Tesla “very significant” allocation of memory despite what he called “pretty insane” prices.
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Tesla has decommissioned the Model S and X lines at its Fremont, California, factory and is installing its first Optimus production line in their place.
Production is expected later this year, although the first robots will be used internally to collect training data and develop new capabilities.
Musk warned that the initial ramp will be “quite flat and long.”
Reliability is another obstacle.
“We don’t want Optimus to go haywire,” Musk said.
If one fails in the field, he added, “you’ve got a 70-kilogram robot that just flops over and you could carry it out like a body.”
