Gigafactory Texas opens and becomes Tesla’s headquarters

On 7 April 2022, Tesla opened Gigafactory Texas in Austin with a “Cyber Rodeo” launch event, beginning production of the Model Y and, later, the Cybertruck. The roughly 10-million-square-foot facility is one of the largest factory buildings in the world by footprint.

Tesla subsequently moved its corporate headquarters to the Austin site from California, making Giga Texas both a flagship manufacturing hub and the company’s home base. It anchored Tesla’s US production expansion and became the launch plant for the Cybertruck.

Relocating the headquarters of America’s most valuable automaker from Silicon Valley to Texas was also a high-profile vote of confidence in the state’s lower-cost, lighter-regulation environment, and it drew a wave of suppliers and talent to the region. The plant’s scale — one of the largest buildings on Earth by footprint, built in well under two years — embodies Tesla’s “the factory is the product” philosophy: treating the manufacturing line itself as a core engineering problem to be redesigned, not merely a place to assemble cars.