Musk said Tesla would be “sort of a dual headquarters company,” with engineering operations in Palo Alto and other facets in Texas.
March 18, 2023 at 2:09 PM ET
Tesla officially moved its corporate headquarters from California to Texas in 2021, but in recent weeks, the automaker has debuted another new headquarters in the West Coast state. Not far from the Gigafactory in Fremont, California, the automaker now has a new space for its engineering operations, conveniently located in Silicon Valley, near other tech companies.
Above: A Tesla Model Y (Image: Casey Murphy / EVANNEX).
Now, Tesla’s engineering headquarters is officially located in Palo Alto, California, as the company and Gov. Gavin Newson announced at a groundbreaking event in recent weeks, and as detailed in reports from Reuters i USA Today. The office space is in a former Hewlett-Packard building, and CEO Elon Musk says opening the engineering headquarters in the space is “poetic.”
“We’re excited to announce that Tesla’s global engineering headquarters will be located right here in the former Hewlett Packard headquarters,” Musk said. “This is a poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla.”
The news came at a groundbreaking event at the Palo Alto location, during which Musk and Newsom were in attendance. Tesla’s Austin, Texas location will remain the company’s main headquarters, but it now says the Palo Alto site will be “effectively a Tesla headquarters.”
Musk also said that Tesla would be “kind of a dual-headquartered company,” with engineering operations taking place in Palo Alto, while most of the automaker’s auto manufacturing and corporate events would report at its headquarters in Austin, Texas.
“It’s going to be epic,” Musk said. “We’re going to build the future here.”
It’s not entirely clear what Tesla will specifically focus on in Palo Alto, though Musk previously said the company would build the next Optimus robot at the location, and it stands to reason that its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving beta programs will stay on site. AI operations can generally be expected to fall under the company’s engineering program.
California also remains home to many rival self-driving companies, including General Motors’ Cruise (San Francisco) and Google Alphabet’s Waymo (Mountain View). Also, Apple is testing autonomous driving and the tech giant is based in Cupertino.
In January, Tesla said its total California operations had grown to about 47,000 employees in the state. The company’s history in California is extensive, and its Fremont factory was the first volume plant for the company’s cars. What’s more, the site still ships cars worldwide today, and Musk says the state will remain a key growth region for Tesla in the coming years.
“While we’re obviously expanding in many parts of the world, we’ve continued to expand in California the whole time,” Musk said. “Each year, we have significantly increased our workforce in California, and we expect that to continue in the future.”
Source: Reuters / USA Today
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