Tesla's long-promised return to in-house solar panel manufacturing now has an address. According to a 19 May 2026 Electrek exclusive, Tesla will build its solar panel operation at the Empire West Business Park in Brookshire, Texas, about 35 miles west of Houston. The site sits next to Tesla's Megapack Megafactory, putting cell production, panel assembly and grid-scale storage manufacturing on the same campus.
It is the first physical site attached to the 100 GW per year US solar manufacturing target Elon Musk announced at Davos in January 2026, when he said Tesla and SpaceX would each independently build out the full solar supply chain from raw materials to finished panels.
Brookshire site: 1.65 million sq ft and growing
Tesla already leases two buildings at Empire West totalling 1.65 million sq ft and is planning a further building of about 600,000 sq ft, bringing the prospective footprint past 2.2 million sq ft. The two existing buildings and the planned expansion sit on the same campus as the Megapack Megafactory, which is Tesla's main US grid-storage hub.
| Building | Footprint | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Building 9 + Building 10 | 1.65 million sq ft (combined) | Leased by Tesla |
| Additional building | ~600,000 sq ft | Planned |
| Co-located | Megapack Megafactory | Operational |
The co-location matters for two reasons. First, finished panels and Megapacks share customers — utilities and large commercial installers buying generation and storage together. Second, Tesla can reuse logistics, power infrastructure and workforce across both product lines.
How it fits the $2.9B Chinese equipment story
The Brookshire site is the destination for the manufacturing equipment Tesla has been quietly sourcing. In March 2026, Electrek reported on a CNBC story that Tesla was in talks to buy roughly $2.9 billion in Chinese solar manufacturing equipment, with Suzhou Maxwell Technologies named among the suppliers. That equipment now has somewhere to go.
The Brookshire footprint is part of a broader US manufacturing build-out. In a related move, pv magazine USA confirmed in March 2026 that Tesla was the previously unnamed buyer behind LG Energy Solution's $4.3 billion LFP cell deal — locking down domestic stationary-storage cell supply alongside the new panel line.
Reality check on 100 GW
The 100 GW figure needs framing. Global solar module production in 2024 was around 700 GW, almost all of it Chinese. A 100 GW US line at one company would be one of the largest single national solar manufacturing footprints ever attempted, and Tesla also says SpaceX is building a separate 100 GW operation. Brookshire's announced footprint, even with the additional building, is not by itself sized for 100 GW; it is the first phase. Tesla has missed solar targets before — the original Buffalo Gigafactory never reached the cell-production scale promised in 2016 — so the right read on 100 GW is aspirational ceiling, not committed capacity.
What it means for European Tesla Energy customers
The Brookshire factory is a US project and will not directly serve European Powerwall or solar customers in the near term. But two indirect effects are worth tracking. If Tesla brings meaningful panel volume online in Texas, it can free up Chinese and Korean supply for non-US markets including the EU, and it diversifies Tesla Energy away from the Asian-only supply chain that has constrained European Powerwall lead times since 2024. For EU buyers of Tesla Megapack and Powerwall, a US-anchored upstream is a resilience story more than a price story — at least until the first Brookshire panels ship.