Elon Musk reveals the number of humanoid robots Tesla plans to deploy by 2025
- Elon Musk says he plans to deploy ‘over a thousand’ Optimus bots at Tesla next year
- He said the robots had made a ‘massive amount of progress’ over a short period of time
- Musk has previously said he believes the bots could be a bigger seller than Tesla cars
Published on Jun 17, 2024 at 12:33 PM (UTC+4)
by Claire Reid
Last updated on Jun 17, 2024 at 6:38 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
Elon Musk has revealed that he plans to deploy ‘over a thousand’ – or potentially ‘a few thousand’ – of Optimus robots at Tesla.
Speaking during a shareholder meeting on Thursday (13 June), Musk said the robots had ‘made a massive amount of progress’ in a relatively short period of time.
He went on to say that the humanoid bots will undergo ‘one major hardware revision’ later this year.
Musk also shared footage of one of the robots working autonomously at a factory.
READ MORE! Tesla Optimus robot filmed performing ‘useful’ at Tesla factory
Tesla has already deployed Optimus bots
In the clip, the robot can be seen carefully performing a battery sorting task, while other footage shows one walking casually through the corridors of the factory.
In a post to X last week, Tesla confirmed that there were ‘two Optimus bots performing tasks in the factory autonomously’, while during the meeting Musk shared that they also have ‘quite a few of these cruising around our offices in Palo Alto’.
Musk said: “We’ve made a massive amount of progress with Optimus in a short period of time, from someone pretending to be a robot dancing in a suit, to a pretty hodge-podgy robot, to a robot that is actually doing useful tasks in the factory today.”
He went on to say that following the hardware revision later this year, there will be a limited run of the bots for use in Tesla factories, where they will undergo further testing.
In all, Musk said he predicted that there will be ‘over a thousand, maybe a few thousand’ Optimus robots deployed at the car-manufactures factories in 2025.
It’s unclear what roles the robots will fill, but Tesla says Optimus is ideal for carrying out ‘unsafe, repetitive or boring tasks’.
Elon Musk thinks the robots could make a lot of money
In April, Musk told investors that the robots would be able to perform factory roles by the end of this year meaning they could go on sale as early as 2025.
The billionaire has previously suggested that Optimus could go on to become a bigger money-maker for the company than its cars.
“I think Tesla is best positioned of any humanoid robot maker to be able to reach volume production with efficient inference on the robot itself,” he shared.
Musk added: “Optimus stuff is extremely underrated.”
But manufacturers in the humanoid robot market are already growing. Chip-designer Nvidia has also unveiled fully humanoid robots set to rival the Optimus robot.
And OpenAI has joined forces with Microsoft, Nvidia, and Jeff Bezos to develop human-like robots.
Claire Reid
Claire Reid is a journalist who hails from the UK but is now living in New Zealand. She began her career after graduating with a degree in Journalism from Liverpool John Moore’s University and has more than a decade of experience, writing for both local newspapers and national news sites. Across her career she's covered a wide variety of topics, including celebrity, cryptocurrency, politics, true crime and just about everything in between.
