In late January, Nikkei spotted a small street-level sign at the entrance to a large office building along an avenue with a view to Hoover Tower, a Stanford University campus landmark. The sign bore Tesla’s name and the complex’s address.
The sighting of the inconspicuous signage comes with the electric vehicle pioneer conducting a major campaign to recruit IT talent in the area, Nikkei has confirmed.
The move suggests Tesla is making an effort to hire engineers versed in artificial intelligence, a technology essential in developing robotics and self-driving cars.
The recruitment drive appears to be fortuitously timed as a number of big West Coast tech companies are cutting costs by letting engineers go.
Nikkei contacted the real estate company that owns the building through an intermediary who has a relationship with the company. A spokesperson said it has received a letter of intent from Tesla, although it had not reached an agreement with the electric vehicle maker by the end of January.
It appears Tesla intends to rent 29,700 sqm of office space.
Tesla, which has broken up its public relations team, did not respond to Nikkei queries by Thursday.
The building hosted the Hewlett Packard Enterprise headquarters until 2019. HPE was a business computing division spun off from Hewlett-Packard, a storied company that began in a one-car garage now associated with the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”.
It is known that Tesla in the fall of 2021 rented part of a cluster of buildings from HP that is currently located next to the former HPE office. Here, near the building with the street-level sign in front of it, in about 30,000 sqm of office space, Tesla teams are developing the Optimus humanoid robot and Dojo, a technology that allows self-driving AI to be trained in a virtual space, according to sources.
Today, with Stanford University and major IT companies acting as magnets, Silicon Valley is attracting a flood of AI specialists.
Tesla moved its headquarters to Texas in 2021 but has remained in Palo Alto to hire cutting-edge talent.
Palo Alto is one of the cities in the Bay Area region better known as Silicon Valley. It is also where Tesla formerly had its headquarters.
The company’s new office plans are meant to help accelerate efforts to develop autonomous driving and AI technologies.
At the end of last month, Tesla posted ads on its website for more than 700 positions in Palo Alto. Of these, 423, or 55%, are technology and IT jobs. There are also 74 autonomous driving and robotics positions.
Tesla’s former headquarters building was in a mountainous area away from downtown Palo Alto. The new office, sitting along a major boulevard, is meant to be more commuter-friendly and help improve Tesla’s attractiveness to potential recruits.
“I don’t think you can see second place behind Tesla with a telescope,” CEO Elon Musk boasted at a financial result briefing on Jan 25. During the event, the company announced a plan to equip its coming Cybertruck with Hardware 4.0, Tesla’s next-generation Autopilot and self-driving hardware suite that will enhance onboard camera performance.
Tesla plans to begin mass-producing the electric pickup next year.
In September, Tesla organised AI Day in Palo Alto, where Musk told invited researchers and students, “We’re seeing just a lot of world-class AI talent join the company.”
Tesla ranked No 5 in an employer popularity ranking among students studying computer science, according to a 2022 survey by Universum, an international company that specializes in employer branding. Perceived as an electric vehicle maker, the company lags behind Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.com in AI technology.
Musk has said new products and services that use AI, including self-driving cars and humanoid robots, are “the thing that has an order of magnitude, potential market cap improvement for Tesla”.
Tesla’s market cap recently stood at around US$540 billion, more than double that of Toyota Motor and making it the automotive industry’s most valuable company. But this remains far behind Apple’s more than US$2 trillion.
For Tesla, AI holds the power that can break it out of its EV maker mould.