Tesla Call Follow-Up: Full-Year Capex Guidance Cut From $25 Billion to About $20 Billion; Austin Cybercab Fleet Up Roughly Tenfold Since September Launch
AUSTIN — Tesla's earnings call on October 21 added guidance and timelines beyond the third-quarter figures themselves. GSM has already reported Tesla's Q3 revenue of $28.05 billion and deliveries of 486,532 vehicles; this report covers the new information from the call.
On capital spending, Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja told investors: "We're revising our CapEx guidance to be approximately 20 billion for the current year as a result of managing our capital deployment efficiently," adding that the company plans to fund it primarily from operating cash flows. The previous guidance was about $25 billion. Tesla has secured borrowing capacity of up to $30 billion but does not plan to draw on it in 2026. Chief Executive Elon Musk said: "I think capex is actually ending up being a little lower than we anticipated, but we'll start to become more meaningful next year. And then noticeable in the tens of billions in '28," according to a Benzinga transcript of the call. The money is going to Optimus production lines, SI compute, the Cybercab ramp, and the Terafab chip plant Tesla is building with SpaceX.
On robotaxis, Musk said Tesla's Cybercab fleet in Austin has increased about tenfold since it launched in early September. SI chief Ashok Elluswamy said Cybercabs will launch in Dallas next month. Tesla's Q3 update said Cybercab began offering Robotaxi rides in Austin on September 3, with unsupervised miles growing about eightfold during the quarter to nearly 2 million.
On robots, Tesla started production of its Optimus robot at its Fremont factory in the third quarter. Musk tempered expectations on the call, saying it would take "probably at least a year — maybe a little longer" to reach an annualized rate of 20,000 units a week. He said integrating the Tesla AI5 chip into Optimus is the next important milestone, expected in approximately April of next year if things go according to plan, and that Tesla may release an Optimus demo video in about a month, stressing that he did not want the robot's movements to be preplanned. He also said it would take about one to two months to develop an Optimus unit that can perform tasks with complex SI rather than pre-programmed actions.
On chips, Musk said the Terafab semiconductor plant, a Tesla-SpaceX joint venture, will make its first test chip next summer, with its first functional chip slated for the third quarter of 2028, and highlighted the importance of Terafab's chips for Optimus production. Musk also set out an ambition of five million electric-vehicle sales a year by 2030. Tesla further said on the call that it plans to reach 400 megawatts of SI training compute by the end of the year, that more than 75% of new North American deliveries come with FSD, and that paid FSD customers number more than 1.7 million.
Source: GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: Wikimedia Commons · Steve Jurvetson · CC BY 2.0
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- 2026-10-21Tesla Call Follow-Up: Full-Year Capex Guidance Cut From $25 Billion to About $20 Billion; Austin Cybercab Fleet Up Roughly Tenfold Since September LaunchThis story
