Tesla wants to build solar cells in Texas, and it has put a number on it: $10.1 billion.
The company filed an application with the Texas Comptroller on Aug. 6 under the Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act, proposing a solar cell and module manufacturing plant in Fort Bend County, southwest of Houston. The filing surfaced in trade coverage on Aug. 24. Per the application, the plant would create 9,712 permanent jobs and more than 1,000 construction jobs, with operations targeted for the first quarter of 2029.
Read the filing as a filing
Those job and dollar figures come from Tesla’s own incentive application, which is standard for JETI submissions and worth flagging as such. Companies file these to establish a negotiating position, and the numbers describe an intent rather than a commitment. Tesla states plainly that it is evaluating other states.
The date matters too. A filing dated Aug. 6 that becomes news on Aug. 24 is not a new decision, and nothing in the record says the incentives have been approved.
The capacity math
If built at the proposed scale, the plant would dwarf Tesla’s existing U.S. solar footprint. The company’s Buffalo, New York operation runs around 300 megawatts a year of module assembly. Elon Musk has publicly tied the effort to a target of 100 gigawatts a year of domestic cell output.
Cell manufacturing is the part that matters. The United States has added module assembly capacity quickly since 2022 because assembly is comparatively simple to stand up. Cells are harder: they need high-purity process utilities, tight contamination control and far more electrical and mechanical infrastructure per square foot. That is a semiconductor-adjacent build, not a warehouse with a line in it.
What contractors should watch
No general contractor or EPC has been selected or disclosed. For a project of this size in the Houston industrial market, that is the item to track, and it will move before ground does.
Don’t conflate this with the other Musk-company Texas project. SpaceX filed separately in May 2026 for a semiconductor facility in Grimes County, and Tesla’s existing Gigafactory Texas in Travis County is a different site with a different program.
Source: Texas Comptroller JETI application, filed Aug. 6, 2026; reported by Construction Dive, Aug. 24, 2026.