Tesla raises 2026 capex to $25B

Tesla raised its 2026 capital-spending plan to more than $25 billion as Elon Musk shifts more money into chips, artificial intelligence and robotics. (reuters.com) The company had told investors in January to expect more than $20 billion of capital expenditures this year; last year it spent $9 billion. Reuters reported the new figure after Tesla’s first-quarter results on April 22. (reuters.com) Tesla’s first-quarter update said the company was ramping additional AI compute, opening new battery and battery-materials factories, and preparing lines for Megapack 3, Cybercab and the Tesla Semi. The same report said first-quarter free cash flow was $1.4 billion. (tesla.com) On the earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Vaibhav Taneja said the heavier spending phase “would last a couple of years” and that Tesla would post negative free cash flow for the rest of 2026. Shares fell 2.4% after those remarks, after initially rising in after-hours trading. (reuters.com) Capital expenditure is money spent on long-lived assets like factories, servers and chip tools, not day-to-day payroll or materials. Tesla is now directing more of that budget toward businesses Musk has been pitching as the company’s next growth engines: robotaxis, humanoid robots and in-house AI hardware. (techcrunch.com) The spending jump lands as Tesla’s car business is still under pressure. Reuters said first-quarter revenue was $22.39 billion, below analysts’ average estimate of $22.6 billion, even as profit beat expectations and cash flow came in stronger than forecast. (reuters.com) A separate disclosure in Tesla’s first-quarter 10-Q added another clue about where the money is going. Electrek reported that Tesla said it had agreed in April 2026 to acquire an unnamed AI hardware company for up to $2 billion in stock and equity awards. (electrek.co) Electrek said about $1.8 billion of that deal is tied to service conditions or performance milestones linked to deployment of the target’s technology. Tesla did not name the company in the filing and did not discuss the acquisition in its shareholder letter or earnings call, according to Electrek. (electrek.co) Electrek also tied the timing of the acquisition to Tesla’s April 15 AI5 chip tape-out, the stage when a chip design is sent for manufacturing. Tesla has not publicly identified the seller, described the hardware, or said how quickly the technology could reach products. (electrek.co) The immediate picture is a company that generated cash in the first quarter, then told investors to expect the opposite through year-end as it accelerates spending on factories, compute and chips. Tesla’s next filings will show whether that bet starts producing revenue before the cash burn deepens. (tesla.com) (reuters.com)