Giga Texas Datacenter, Austin, Texas

Tesla runs an AI training data center, which it calls Cortex, at Gigafactory Texas outside Austin in Travis County, and the Giga Texas data center more than doubled its computing power in the first half of 2026. Tesla's Q2 2026 report showed on-site AI training capacity in Texas rising from roughly 115 megawatts at the end of 2025 to about 260 megawatts by the end of June, with a goal of nearly 400 megawatts by the end of the year, according to Not a Tesla App's reading of the report's chart.

The first Cortex cluster, 50,000 Nvidia H100 chips, came online at the Austin factory in the fourth quarter of 2024, according to Tesla's shareholder deck. "Cortex helped enable V13 of FSD (Supervised)," the deck said. Musk said on the company's earnings call in January 2025 that the training needs for the Optimus humanoid robot are "probably at least 10x of what is needed for the car to get to the full range of useful roles." The expansion now under way is Cortex 2.0; state construction filings describe new construction for it on Robotic Avenue on the Austin campus. "Cortex 2 supports the development of both vehicle and humanoid robot autonomy software and will ramp further over the rest of the year to ensure we have sufficient compute resources," Tesla said in its Q2 2026 report.

Gigafactory Texas covers 2,500 acres and employs 16,500 people, who build electric vehicles and batteries and are adding lines for robots and new products. Tesla is also building a facility there for chip refining and packaging for its Terafab semiconductor project, whose main plant is planned in Grimes County. Terafab's state agreement lists a December 1, 2026 construction start in Grimes County and completion by the end of 2028.

Little about the data center is public. Tesla did not respond to the Austin American-Statesman's requests for interviews or visits, and a lawyer for the company recently called the site "essentially Fort Knox."

In Travis County, Tesla recently had part of its tax rebate withheld for not complying with its economic development agreement.