Optimus robots start real work in Tesla factories

Tesla moved Optimus from stage demos toward genuine utility, deploying early units inside its own factories to perform real tasks and building a dedicated production line aimed at very high volumes. Using its own plants as the first customer lets Tesla iterate the hardware and AI in a controlled, data-rich environment.

The strategic bet is that the same advances powering Full Self-Driving — vision, neural networks, real-world data and in-house actuators and batteries — transfer to a humanoid robot, and that Tesla's manufacturing muscle can build one cheaply at scale. Musk has argued Optimus could eventually be Tesla's most valuable product.

It remains early-stage: the robots are not yet a finished commercial product, and some past demos were partly teleoperated, which Tesla was fairly criticised for not making clear. But putting humanoids to work on a real production line — rather than just walking across a stage — is a concrete step few competitors have matched at this scale.