Tesla files to expand Gigafactory Texas with giant new building

Tesla has filed with the city of Austin to expand Gigafactory Texas with a giant new 500,000-square-foot building at the site.

Now Gigafactory Texas is already giant. It’s already one of the biggest buildings on Earth.

The current building is equivalent to about 15 city blocks or three Pentagons as CEO Elon Musk said earlier this year.

It offers just over 4 million square feet of space and fits about 338 million cubic feet of volume.

But regardless of how big it is, Tesla still has plenty of room to expand at the location since the project currently sits on a 3.3-square-mile piece of land.

This week, Tesla has filed a building permit to expand on that land with another extremely big building:

In the description for the permit application, Tesla writes:

“All above ground piping and underground plumbing, GA 2 and 3 expansion, 500,000 square foot.”

A 500,000-square-foot new expansion would be a significant new building at the factory.

“GA” normally refers to general assembly – meaning that Tesla plans to build two new assembly lines in that new building.

It’s not clear if it would be to increase production of the Model Ys currently being built at the factory or if Tesla plans to use the space to build new models that are supposed to come to Gigafactory Texas next year, like Cybertruck and Tesla Semi.

Tesla is not revealing much about the production ramp-up of Model Y at Gigafactory Texas, but Electrek recently reported that insider information puts production at a few thousand units in a week for the first time.

However, it is unclear if this is sustainable as Tesla has complained about its new 4680 battery cells and its structural battery pack being a bottleneck. We also have indications that Tesla is now building Model Y Long Range vehicles with 2170 cells in order to get around that bottleneck.

Gigafactory Texas is one of the world’s biggest factories not only because Tesla wants high volume production at the plant but also because the automaker wants to be vertically integrated down to battery cell production on site.

Tesla has been ramping up production of 4680 cells at the factory, and it is even adding a cathode processing plant on the same piece of land.