Tesla clears Fremont's Model S and X lines for Optimus and sends its first robots to an in-house academy as quarterly capex jumps to $5.8 billion

Tesla has moved Optimus from a slide to a factory floor. In its second-quarter 2026 update, posted after the US market close on July 22, the company said it has decommissioned the manufacturing lines for the Model S and Model X at its Fremont, California plant and is installing the first-generation production lines for its humanoid robot, where it expects production to start soon.

The first robots off those lines will stay in-house. Tesla wrote that the initial Optimus builds will be used in what it calls the Optimus Academy, for training data collection and further development of the robot's functions. At Gigafactory Texas, the site Tesla named in April for a later and much larger robot line, site development continued and building construction is now in full swing, the update said. Its capacity table still lists Optimus in both California and Texas with the status "Construction" and no capacity number, the same entry as three months earlier.

The numbers around the robot

The quarter that paid for this was mixed. Revenue rose 26% to $28.24 billion from $22.50 billion a year earlier, and Tesla said trailing twelve-month revenue passed $100 billion for the first time. Gross margin fell to 16.8% from 21.1% in the first quarter. Research and development expense climbed to $2.37 billion, up 49% from $1.59 billion a year earlier and 22% from the first quarter, and income from operations dropped to $398 million, a 1.4% operating margin against 4.1% in the second quarter of 2025. Net income attributable to common stockholders was $1.11 billion.

Spending is the bigger story. Capital expenditure reached $5.79 billion in the quarter, 2.32 times the $2.49 billion of the first quarter and 142% above the year-earlier level. The 10-Q puts first-half capex at $8.28 billion. With operating cash flow of $4.70 billion, free cash flow was minus $1.09 billion, the only negative quarter in the five-quarter history Tesla printed. Cash, cash equivalents and investments ended June at $43.52 billion, down from $44.74 billion at the end of March. Tesla does not say how much of the capex went to Optimus; the same update also describes Cybercab production, a Semi factory in Nevada, Megafactory Texas, AI training compute and a semiconductor fab in Austin.

What changed since April

Set against the first-quarter update, the language is more concrete about buildings and less specific about scale. In April Tesla said preparations for its first large-scale Optimus factory would begin shortly in the second quarter, that the first-generation line in Fremont was designed for 1 million robots a year, and that it was preparing Gigafactory Texas for a second-generation line designed for long-term annual capacity of 10 million. The July text reports the car lines gone and installation under way, but does not restate either capacity figure. The outlook sentence changed from lines installed "in anticipation of volume production" to "in anticipation of production in 2026". Tesla made a similar edit for the Semi and Megapack 3, dropping "volume" there too, so the change may reflect house style rather than a narrower plan.

The Gen 3 thread has gone quiet. In its fourth-quarter 2025 update in January, Tesla said it planned to unveil the Gen 3 version of Optimus in the first quarter of 2026, calling it the first design meant for mass production, and set start of production on the first line before the end of 2026. Neither the April nor the July update mentions Gen 3 or an unveiling. The end-2026 production goal survives in writing; the design that is supposed to be built on the new lines has not been described in a Tesla filing since January.

Compute and the academy

The academy makes sense next to the compute disclosures. Tesla said Cortex 2, its Texas training cluster, supports both vehicle and humanoid robot autonomy software and will ramp further through the year, and that onsite compute in Texas more than doubled, measured in megawatts, during the first half of 2026. Humanoid makers are short of real-world robot data in a way car makers with millions of camera-equipped vehicles are not. A fleet of early robots doing scripted and repeated tasks inside Tesla's own buildings is a way to manufacture that data before selling the product.

The rest of the business is pulling on the same engineers. Tesla produced 451,758 vehicles and delivered 480,126 in the quarter and deployed 13.5 GWh of storage. Cybercab began production at Gigafactory Texas, with a listed capacity of more than 125,000 units, and the Semi line in Nevada is in commissioning.

How rivals compare

Competitors are already shipping and counting. Figure AI said in April that its BotQ line had reached a rate of one Figure 03 robot per hour and that more than 350 had been delivered, and in June put the robot on BMW's Spartanburg floor; its last disclosed valuation was $39 billion after a Series C of more than $1 billion. Agility Robotics agreed in June to list through Churchill Capital Corp XI at a $2.5 billion pre-money equity value, with a Foxconn-led PIPE of about $200 million. In China, UBTech sold 921 full-size humanoids in the first half of 2026, Unitree raised RMB6.10 billion in its STAR Market listing in August, and AgiBot rolled out its 20,000th robot in September. Tesla has not published a single Optimus unit figure.

Risks and open questions

The update leaves the commercial questions unanswered. Tesla gives no count of robots built, no external customer, no price, no named supplier for actuators, hands or batteries, and no split of capex by programme. Reserving the first output for an internal academy implies the robot is not yet ready for paying work outside Tesla. Margins are thin, R&D is rising fast, and the company is funding several factory ramps at once from a cash pile that shrank in the quarter.

The next checkpoints are close. Tesla typically publishes third-quarter production and deliveries in early October and its third-quarter update in late October, where the Optimus row in the capacity table will show whether Fremont has moved beyond "Construction". The January 2026 target of starting production before the end of 2026 is the hard deadline Tesla set for itself.