The opening ceremony in Austin, billed as a “Cyber Rodeo”, kicked off at 4pm and was set to run until midnight. Tesla applied for a permit to accommodate up to 15,000 people for what Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted might be “the biggest party on earth”.
Wearing a black cowboy hat, Musk rode in on the first car the company ever made, a roadster, and took the stage at around 9.30pm.
“We need a place where we can go really big, and there is no place like Texas,” he said to a cheering crowd of invited guests, many of them Tesla car owners.
The US EV maker moved its global headquarters from Silicon Valley to Austin in December. The Texas Gigafactory will start by producing the Model Y SUV this year before starting production of the much-anticipated Cybertruck in 2023.
Tesla will also produce its large-cell 4680 EV battery at the plant. “Over time, this will be the biggest cell factory in the world,” Musk said.
Last month, Musk flew to Germany to cut the red ribbon of the company’s first factory in Europe. The opening of the Berlin and Texas plants came as the Shanghai Gigafactory is facing production disruptions.
A recent spike in Covid-19 cases in China and a citywide lockdown in Shanghai forced Tesla to temporarily shut down the Shanghai factory in March and again in April.
The factory remains shut, and the date of production resumption had yet to be decided as of Friday, according to Chinese media reports.
Even before the temporary shutdown, Tesla’s factory in China had been under pressure to keep up with demand, as it serves the rapidly growing Chinese market and is also a key export hub. Shanghai-made Teslas accounted for more than half of all vehicles the company delivered in 2021.
Tesla saw vehicle production dip in the three months to March. The company produced 305,407 vehicles from January to March, down from 305,840 the previous quarter.
“This was an exceptionally difficult quarter due to supply chain interruptions & China zero Covid policy,” Musk tweeted on April 2.
It has yet to be seen if the Austin and Berlin factories can ramp up production quickly enough to make up for some of the production delays amid the China factory freeze. With the two new factories, Tesla is aiming to increase deliveries by 50% year-over-year in 2022.
Opening new plants is not the only thing Musk has been up to recently. The CEO was named a member of the board of Twitter on Tuesday following news he had taken a 9.2% stake in the social media giant.