The big Tesla news this week surrounds the company’s request for property-tax breaks for siting a $10.1 billion solar factory — “Project Crystal Sun” — outside Houston. Tesla is exploring five parcels of land in Richmond, Texas, near the operating Cutlass Solar project and has asked for financial assistance through the state’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act (JETI) program.
According to documents submitted to the Texas Comptroller last month by advisory firm Kroll, Tesla is exploring additional sites across the county but claims it will begin construction this year and reach commercial operations in Q1 2029 at the manufacturing facility for “photovoltaic solar cells and/or assembled solar modules.”
Operations at the proposed facility would “focus on producing finished photovoltaic products” for deployment in all markets. Kroll states that Tesla will need wafer and ingot manufacturing equipment, metallization and printing lines, cell testing equipment and other cleanroom and safety systems. The facility is estimated to create 9,712 permanent full time jobs and over 1,000 jobs during construction.
The language follows closely with what Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said in the past: that he wants to work toward getting “100 GW a year of solar cell production” in the United States. But what kind of solar factory could really be built in the United States with $10.1 billion?
What Tesla wants to produce
Based on the equipment that Tesla needs, the site would likely perform silicon ingot pulling, wafer slicing, cell production and final panel assembly. This is far more advanced than what most manufacturers in the United States currently perform. The U.S. is largely a panel assembly market, relying on imports of solar cells and other upstream silicon components.
Not for lack of trying, there are only a handful of companies manufacturing upstream portions of the silicon solar panel supply — Corning is making wafers in Michigan; solar cells are made by Canadian Solar in Indiana, Suniva in Georgia and ES Foundry in South Carolina. There would be price advantages to Tesla if it made every silicon solar step in the same proposed sprawling campus.
There is only one other factory in the United States that is expected to perform the same steps as Tesla: Qcells’ ingot-to-panel operations in Georgia. Qcells has spent more than $2.5 billion over the last three years to build its facility in Cartersville, which today is only operational at the cell and panel assembly phases. Ingots and wafers have yet to come online. The integrated Qcells facility has an expected manufacturing capacity of 3.5 GW annually.
Is 100 GW attainable?
Based purely on Qcells’ spending, it seems unlikely that Tesla could make Musk’s theoretical 100-GW manufacturing capacity with $10 billion. Luckily, Solar Power World contributor Finlay Colville did some smarter math for us earlier this year to see exactly what it would take to reach three-digit-capacity.
Colville looked at Jinko Solar’s 56-GW ingot-to-module factory in China that was built between 2023 and 2025 and determined that it cost approximately $8 billion to construct, noting that China has an easier time with project siting and land acquisition. Colville said that Tesla is at an advantage in 2026 due to the cost of production equipment declining approximately 30% since Jinko built its plant, so costs would be saved there.
Colville ultimately determined that Tesla would need to spend $16 billion to achieve 100 GW of manufacturing capacity in the United States. Of course, more would have to be spent on repairs and maintenance and upgrading the manufacturing lines as n-type technologies advance. Read Colville’s excellent explainer in full here.
So for $10 billion? It’s probably safe to say the proposed factory in Texas would not make 100 GW of solar panels each year.