Elon Musk speaks at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Autonomous car are a “solved problem, ” he said, and the robots are coming.
Markus Schreiber/Associated Press
Tesla Inc. reported a steep drop in profit Wednesday, a dismal end to an already low performance year. Still, CEO Elon Musk claimed some achievements and shared plans for 2026 that will have impacts in Austin as the company puts its focus on autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence. Here are four key takeaways for Texas:
Doubling down on unsupervised Robotaxi rides
Days after a public spectacle to promote its touted leap to offer Robotaxi rides without human safety monitors, Musk declared Wednesday that the rides are being offered on a “randomly selected” basis.
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A safety monitor rides in the front passenger seat as a Tesla Robotaxi drives on Metro Center Drive in Austin on Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2026. CEO Elon Musk promised the cars would be fully autonomous by the new year.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
If true, those eager to take a private ride might eventually get one. For now, despite claims from Musk and others in the company, Tesla’s Robotaxi-branded fleet in Austin is most accurately described as semi-autonomous.
Still, Austin drivers can expect to share the road with even more autonomous vehicles as Tesla aims to increase the number of unsupervised cars in its fleet.
Gigafactory Texas is home to a growing AI efforts
The company offered updates on its Austin plant supporting infrastructure such as its battery manufacturing efforts and increased AI training compute.
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To assist with the latter, Tesla already has its so-called Cortex 1 supercomputer running. On Wednesday, it said it is currently building Cortex 2 in Austin in an effort to more than double the size of onsite compute in Texas.
European Union regulators have opened a formal investigation into Elon Musk’s social media platform X after its AI chatbot Grok started producing nonconsensual sexualized deepfake images.
Vincent Feuray/Tribune News Service
“We aim to maximize capital efficiency by scaling training compute judiciously, including when the training backlog gets too long or in anticipation of greater demand from our engineers to support our AI-related offerings,” Tesla said.
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Elsewhere, Musk’s supercomputing activities have come under scrutiny. Earlier this month, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that xAI acted illegally by using methane gas turbines to power Memphis datacenters.
Cybertruck line will transition to fully autonomous
Speaking with investors and reporters after issuing its earnings report, company leaders downplayed the dizzying decline in sales of the Austin-made Cybertruck. Nonetheless, Musk said he has plans for the truck and its production line.
Tesla Cybertrucks lined up in July at Gigafactory Texas in Austin. Sales fell nearly 50% in 2025 from a year earlier — and nearly 70% in the fourth quarter.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
“We will transition the Cybertruck line to just a fully autonomous line,” he said. “There’s obviously a market there for cargo delivery … there’s a lot of cargo that needs to move locally within a city and an autonomous Cybertruck could be very useful for that.”
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Though Tesla doesn’t break out Cybertruck in its quarterly report on deliveries, Cox Automotive Inc. said its data show full-year sales fell nearly 50% to 20,237 units in 2025. They were down nearly 70 in the fourth quarter. It’s a far cry from what Musk promised at its 2019 unveiling. Then, he claimed demand for the hulking vehicle was “off the hook” and set a goal to produce 250,000 units annually.
Another key facility at Gigafactory Texas
Cathode material, a key part of the batteries that power EVs, is also an important part of Tesla’s work at its Austin factory. Tesla boasts an in-house cathode manufacturing facility at the site, but Musk repeated his oft-stated invitation for others to build such capacity.
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New Tesla Model Y electric cars, some with Robotaxi markings, are parked on a lot in southeast Austin Friday, Jan. 2, 2026.
Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman
Noting that its new lithium refinery near Robstown is efficient and advanced, Musk said “the same is true of our cathode refinery here in Austin and we wish others would build this.”
“It’s very hard to build these things, and we build them out of desperation because nobody else is building lithium refineries and cathode refineries,” Musk said. “We’re making sure that no matter what happens, Tesla will prosper.”
