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Elon Musk Reveals the Significance of the Ongoing Giga Texas Expansion Project – “The Part Furthest Away From the Glass Will be a Super Dense, Water-Cooled Supercomputer Cluster”

Elon Musk has finally revealed some details regarding the Giga Texas expansion project, which has been shrouded in mystery. Musk says, “The rear portion of the factory extension will be a super dense, water-cooled supercomputer cluster.”
Tesla Giga Texas

Giga Texas is currently the largest production facility in the world. In fact, based on interior volume, Tesla’s Texas factory is the largest building on the planet.

Tesla’s Austin, Texas, facility is three times the size of the Pentagon, which in its own right is one of the largest buildings in the world.

All this is to emphasize how large Giga Texas is. However, despite the factory’s already enormous size, Tesla is undertaking an expansion project to grow Giga Texas even larger.

Last year, Musk announced this expansion project, stating that Tesla would expand Giga Texas to make the factory a literal mile long. This is to remedy the fact that although the factory is the longest in the world, it still has not achieved the coveted full mile-length milestone.

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In accordance with Musk’s announcement, a few months earlier, Tesla began the Giga Texas expansion project. Since then, we have been following the factory’s expansion projects thanks to Jeff Roberts’, Brad Sloan’s, and Joe Tegtmeyer's frequent drone flights over the factory.

Tesla began preparing the ground for the Giga Texas expansion project only a few months ago. However, the expansion project appears to be nearing completion quickly.

All the major structural work for the Giga Texas extension is complete, and Tesla is currently installing finishing touches, including large window pieces, to complete the project.

Despite nearing completion, since Musk initially stated that the factory would grow to a literal mile long, the EV maker hasn’t publicly commented on the construction progress.

However, today, Musk finally gave us an update on the Giga Texas extension project. In response to Jeff Roberts’ latest drone flight over the facility, Musk said, “The roof will be fully covered by solar, except for the word “TESLA,” which will be gently outlined in light so that you can see it at night from airliners coming into Austin.”

This is certainly exciting and further proves Tesla absolutely intends to finish the massive 70MW Giga Texas roof solar array once the extension project is finished. When completed, Giga Texas will house the largest roof-top solar system.

It’s nice to learn that despite the factory’s enormous size, Tesla still intends to make Giga Texas both functional and beautiful.

Although Tesla has not said much about the Giga Texas expansion project, given its size, the factory’s growth has been easy to see with the naked eye.

However, the purpose for which Tesla planned to utilize the extra floor space gained by the Giga Texas expansion project has remained a mystery.

Luckily, today, Musk also finally answered that question. Musk said, “The rear portion of the factory extension (the part furthest away from the glass) will be a super dense, water-cooled supercomputer cluster.”

Leaked reports from inside Tesla state that during the massive restructuring at the EV maker, during which 15,000 employees were let go in a single day and Musk reportedly fired the entire 500-person Tesla charging team, the Tesla CEO decided the top priority going forward for the EV maker will be solving level 5 full self-driving.

In accordance with this shift in priorities, Tesla has been investing heavily in expanding its full self-driving capability for the past few months.

In the first quarter of the year, Tesla revealed that, in only three months, the company had doubled its entire artificial intelligence training compute capacity. Musk revealed that Tesla’s AI computing capacity will once again double before the end of the year.

Now, it appears that the further doubling of Tesla’s AI computing capacity will come from the extension project currently underway at Giga Texas.

When it comes to AI training computers, Tesla has taken a dual approach: purchasing the latest chips from suppliers such as Nvidia and the company’s renowned A100 chips and designing and building an AI training computer in-house.

Despite questions to elaborate further, Musk has not responded whether the Giga Texas “super dense water-cooled supercomputer” will comprise Nvidia A100 tensor core GPUs or Tesla’s in-house Dojo computer.

Some have questioned the wisdom of completely focusing Tesla on solving full self-driving while putting the expansion of automotive production on hold.

However, Musk’s single-minded focus on vehicle autonomy appears to be paying off. Tesla recently launched FSD version 12, an end-to-end neural network self-driving software.

Users of Tesla’s latest FSD software have reported that the system is far more smother and human-like compared to Tesla’s previous FSD versions, which use over 300,000 lines of code to instruct the vehicle what to do in all sorts of driving scenarios.

Musk has also said that Tesla’s next FSD iteration, FSD v12.4, will start a limited customer rollout in the coming few days and that this software will improve miles driven without intervention by 5 to 10 folds.

Musk also said that the EV maker will roll out another major FSD update in late June, which should bring the FSD functionality to Tesla’s Cybertruck.

Currently, Tesla appears to be going full steam ahead toward level 5 autonomy, and we will keep you posted as the EV maker reaches more milestones along the way. Until then, visit our site, torquenews.com/Tesla, regularly for the latest updates.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised that the Giga Texas expansion project is earmarked for supercomputers rather than growing vehicle production capacity? Do you think Musk is correct in making AI the top priority at Tesla? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below by clicking the red “Add new comment” button.

Image: Courtesy of Jeff Roberts on YouTube

For more information, check out: A Tesla Cybertruck Seen at a Gas Station Powering Several Gas Pumps Allowing ICE Vehicles to Fill Up – A Cybertruck Comes to the Rescue After a Power Grid Failure in Oil-Country Texas

Tinsae Aregay has been following Tesla and the evolution of the EV space daily for several years. He covers everything about Tesla, from the cars to Elon Musk, the energy business, and autonomy. Follow Tinsae on Twitter at @TinsaeAregay for daily Tesla news.

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