What's Up With Tesla's New Engineering Headquarters In California?

Musk said Tesla would be "kind of a dual-headquartered company," with engineering operations in Palo Alto and other facets in Texas.

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Posted on EVANNEX on March 17, 2023, by Peter McGuthrie

Tesla officially moved its corporate headquarters from California to Texas in 2021, but in recent weeks, the automaker has debuted another new headquarters in the West Coast state. Not far from the company’s Fremont, California Gigafactory, the automaker now has a new space for its engineering operations, aptly located in Silicon Valley near a number of other tech companies.

Above: A Tesla Model Y (Image: Casey Murphy / EVANNEX).

Now, Tesla’s engineering headquarters is officially located in Palo Alto, California, as announced by the company and Governor Gavin Newson at an opening event in recent weeks, and as detailed in reports from Reuters and USA Today. The office space is located in a former Hewlett-Packard building, and CEO Elon Musk says the opening of the engineering headquarters in the space is “poetic.”

“We’re excited to announce that Tesla’s global engineering headquarters will be right here, at the former headquarters of Hewlett Packard,” Musk said. “This is a poetic transition from the company that founded Silicon Valley to Tesla.”

The news came at an opening event at the Palo Alto location, during which Musk and Newsom were both present. Tesla’s Austin, Texas location will remain the company’s main headquarters, but now he says the Palo Alto site will be “effectively a headquarters of Tesla.”

Musk also said that Tesla would be “kind of a dual-headquartered company,” with engineering operations taking place in Palo Alto, while most of the automaker’s car manufacturing and corporate happenings would report to its Austin, Texas headquarters.

“It’s going to be epic,” Musk said. “We’re going to build the future here.”

It’s not entirely clear what Tesla will specifically focus on in Palo Alto, though Musk previously said the company would build the upcoming Optimus robot at the location, and it only stands to reason that its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving beta programs will be hosted at the site. In general, AI operations can be expected to fall under the company’s engineering program.

California also remains a host to many rivaling autonomous driving companies, including the General Motors-owned Cruise (San Francisco) and Google parent Alphabet’s Waymo (Mountain View). Additionally, Apple is testing autonomous driving and the tech giant is headquartered in Cupertino.

In January, Tesla said its total California operations had increased to about 47,000 employees in the state. The company’s history in California is vast, and its Fremont factory was the first at-volume plant for the company’s cars. Additionally, the site still ships automobiles around the world today, and Musk says the state will remain a key region of growth for Tesla in the years to come.

“Although we are obviously expanding in many parts of the world, we’ve continued to expand in California the entire time,” Musk said. “Every year, we’ve grown our headcount in California significantly and we expect that to continue in the future.”