At the 2025 shareholder meeting, Tesla announced a $20,000 price target for its Optimus humanoid robot once mass production starts. The company plans an extremely fast production ramp, aiming to produce up to 4 million units annually by the end of 2027. This initiative leverages Tesla's automotive technologies to make the robot accessible on a large scale.
Tesla has shifted its view of the Optimus humanoid robot from a long-term research project to a major production effort, as revealed at the 2025 shareholder meeting. Elon Musk and the executive team outlined an ambitious strategy to achieve high-volume, low-cost manufacturing, similar to the Model 3 and Model Y. The $20,000 USD price target is intended to make Optimus widely accessible, supporting Tesla's vision of sustainable abundance and poverty elimination.
The production plan includes several stages. Optimus Gen 3 will be revealed in early 2026, with production beginning later that year. In the near term, Tesla aims for a 1 million units per year line at the Fremont Factory. By the end of 2027, the company aspirationally targets 4 million units per year. Long-term, a 10 million units per year line is planned at Giga Texas.
Musk described this as 'the fastest production ramp of any complex product - ever.' Optimus builds on a decade of Tesla's work with wheeled autonomous vehicles, sharing technologies like actuators, power electronics, batteries, cameras, and AI chips. This reduces new challenges to robotic-specific elements, such as forearms and hands, which Musk called 'extremely challenging to engineer' and one of Tesla's 'hardest projects.'
Achieving general-purpose capabilities will require tens of billions in training compute investment, beyond current spending. This ties into developments like the AI5 chip and TeraFab, emphasizing the AI brain's importance alongside hardware. The plan integrates Tesla's manufacturing expertise, Full Self-Driving neural networks, and low-cost economics to advance humanoid robotics.