Tesla, Inc.

Tesla, Inc. is the American company whose humanoid robot programme has become one of the most closely watched efforts to build a machine meant for general-purpose work. The robot, now called Optimus, began as a concept shown on a stage and has since been described in company plans as a product to be manufactured at very large scale.

Origins: the first AI Day

Tesla held its first AI Day at its Palo Alto headquarters on 19 August 2021, and used the event to reveal a humanoid robot concept ^[1]. The same event was also where the company showed its D1 AI training chip and the Dojo supercomputer ^[1], the computing hardware it presented alongside the robot.

Tesla said the purpose of the robot was to do dangerous, repetitive or boring work ^[1][2]. That framing set the machine apart from a demonstration piece: the stated job was the kind of labour that is hard to staff, dull to repeat or risky for people. Musk said at AI Day that a first physical version was expected the following year ^[1].

A new name, a new date

In June 2022 Musk said the robot had been renamed Optimus and that the second AI Day was moved to 30 September ^[2]. The name has stayed with the programme since.

From concept to production plans

A 2025 report said Tesla had announced that a pilot production line for Optimus was running at its Fremont factory, and that a larger third-generation line was expected to start production in 2026 ^[3]. The same report said Tesla's goal after scaling production was to bring the cost of each robot below US$20,000 ^[3]. It also said the company was preparing an expansion of Gigafactory Texas for high-volume Optimus production, with a target capacity of 10 million units a year ^[3].

Those numbers describe a manufacturing ambition rather than a finished product. A pilot line is where a design is turned into something that can be assembled repeatedly; a target capacity of 10 million units a year is a figure on the scale of consumer electronics or mass-market vehicles, not of the small batches in which humanoid robots have generally been built. The stated cost target works the same way: it is a goal set for a future production stage, not a price at which the robot has been sold.

Where it stands

A September 2025 report said Tesla had stated that Optimus 3 would be unveiled at the end of 2025, with mass production from 2026 and an estimated price range of US$20,000-30,000 ^[4]. That price range sits above the sub-US$20,000 figure given for the period after production is scaled ^[3][4].

Read together, the public statements trace a shift in emphasis. The 2021 event was about announcing a concept and the computing hardware behind it ^[1]; by 2025 the news was about lines, factories, capacity and unit cost ^[3][4]. The timeline has also moved: a physical version was expected the year after the first AI Day ^[1], while the later plans place a third-generation robot and volume production in the middle of the decade's second half ^[3][4].

For anyone following robotics, Tesla's programme is worth watching for two reasons that are visible in the record rather than in the promises. First, the company has tied the robot to its own AI training hardware, presenting the D1 chip and Dojo in the same breath as the machine ^[1]. Second, it has framed the problem as one of manufacturing and cost, naming factories, line generations and per-unit targets ^[3][4]. Whether a robot of this kind can be built cheaply and in large numbers is the open question the published plans are aimed at.