Tesla paid almost $100 million for Gigafactory Texas land in Austin

Tesla has paid almost $100 million for the large piece of land where it is building Gigafactory Texas in Austin.

After months of going through the process to secure approval from the local government, Tesla announced last month that it selected a site outside of Austin to build its next Gigafactory in the US.

Much has been said about the size of the piece of land.

The 2,000-acre land is Tesla’s largest property to date and offers some great potential for expansions.

Now, the original owners revealed how much Tesla paid for the land.

TXI Operations LP, a subsidiary of Martin Marietta Inc, owned the land.

Due to the latter being a publicly-traded company, we are able to learn more about the deal with Tesla, who bought the property through its own subsidiary: Colorado River Project LLC,.

During the release of their last financial results, they disclosed that they sold the land for $97 million (via Austin Business Journal):

“In Martin Marietta’s (NYSE: MLM) second-quarter earnings call on July 28, President and CEO Howard Nye said the company sold an excess property in Austin that was a “depleted standing gravel location” for nearly $100 million. Martin Marietta disclosed the actual sale price in a securities filing the same day.”

The CEO didn’t name Tesla, but it wasn’t difficult to connect the dots.

As we have been reporting, the automaker plans to move fast on this project, and work is already underway at the 2,000-acre site.

Tesla hasn’t offered official timelines for the production of its several vehicle programs to be built at the new factory, but we have heard some remarkably aggressive timelines.

Heavy machinery has been spotted on the site seven days a week since last month preparing a large part of the site for construction.

A drone video from last Friday showed that Tesla has already made a lot of progress:

However, construction work on the first building hasn’t started yet, but it is expected to start soon.