• Tesla has begun production of its humanoid robot, Optimus, in Fremont, California.
• Musk said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of 2027.
• Musk said it will take at least a year to produce 20,000 Optimus units a week.

Tesla has begun producing its long-awaited humanoid robot, Optimus, at its Fremont factory, the company said in its quarterly earnings report.

"The bots coming off this line are the first production-quality bots that we have manufactured," Tesla said, saying the current manufacturing process is "suitable for a commercial product."

"There's still some things we need to tweak about the design, because you need to deliver a robot that is safe and reliable and has long duration," CEO Elon Musk said on Tesla's Q3 earnings call. "It can't, like, wear out after a month."

Musk said the company will take at least a year to scale up Optimus production to 20,000 units a week in Fremont. He said he expects to begin delivering Optimus to customers at the end of next year.

Musk tempered expectations about how quickly Tesla can scale up Optimus production because it is "such a radically new product." He said the early stages of production will be "somewhat bumpy" because "there's like 10,000 things that have to go right" to build the robot. One of the big challenges Musk outlined is building robot hands.

Musk said Tesla is building an "Optimus Academy," where robots will practice tasks and generate data to improve the AI models that power them. The company also plans to install its next-generation AI5 chip in Optimus in April, which will give the robots more computing power and be a "big step change in intelligence," Musk said.

The latest version of Optimus has not been unveiled. Musk said he expects to release a video of Optimus within one or two months. He previously said Tesla was keeping the robot under wraps to prevent competitors from copying its design.

Tesla stopped producing the Model S and Model X at its Fremont, California, plant earlier this year to make room for an Optimus line designed to eventually produce a million robots a year. A second line under construction in Austin is planned to have an annual capacity of 10 million robots.

Tesla is competing in a crowded humanoid market. Agility Robotics, which plans to go public, has deployed its Digit robot across nine customer facilities, while Figure AI has announced deployments in logistics and distribution centers this year. Sunday Robotics, 1X, and Weave Robotics are preparing to ship robots into homes this fall.

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Daft Punk only had it half right. Robots don't just rock; they also draw a ton of investment.

The French musicians who famously donned robot helmets retired five years ago, but Silicon Valley's obsession with robotics is reaching a fever pitch.

Robotics and physical AI companies raised $33.4 billion globally in the first half of 2026. It's a stunning rise for a sector that didn't even hit $5 billion in funding in all of 2020.

Rya Jetha, our resident robotics expert, wrote about why Silicon Valley is betting billions on a robot revolution. It's the first installment in Robonomics, our new series examining the rise of robots and their impact on business, jobs, and everyday life.

The size of the market that robotics can address is a big draw. The need for physical labor is so vast — from construction sites to at-home butlers — the possibilities are almost endless.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a huge proponent of physical AI, valued the industry at … $50 trillion.

Just because the opportunity is there doesn't mean it'll be easy to realize.

Here are some of the biggest pain points standing in the way of the robotics revolution:

Not an easy hand-off: When talking about robots, the discussion typically starts and ends with human hands. It turns out our paws are pretty special, and quite difficult to recreate.

Granted, not every company wants to replicate the human hand. But a lot of tasks require the dexterity we have. Figuring out how to build those capabilities into robots hasn't been easy.

Hardware is hard: Building robots has gotten considerably cheaper than years ago thanks to advancements in computing and hardware. It's still a much more expensive endeavor than most software work, though. It's one thing to rewrite some code. It's another to build an entirely new prototype.

Those problems get magnified as you try to scale up physical production. The smallest mistake becomes a bigger problem if it gets too far down your supply chain. Just ask Elon Musk about it.

Human pushback: Companies often pitch AI tools as a way to enhance, not eliminate, human workers. Whether that's the reality is up for debate. Building robots to perform the same physical labor as humans leaves less room for interpretation.

Some still don't see it as a zero-sum game. Edward Mehr, the CEO of robotics startup Machina Labs, previously told me his new factory had the same number of human workers as one at a robot-free facility.

If robots do start replacing humans, they'll have to navigate another nuance specific to the blue-collar world: unions.

AI has benefited some blue-collar workers, including those involved in building AI data centers. That construction has been a boon for tradespeople, with some national labor unions even siding with developers.

They'll be a lot less friendly if robots mean replacing their members, though.