Tesla Is Building the Biggest Factory in the World to Make Batteries for Its Model 3

Out in the sweltering heat of the Nevada desert, Tesla is cooking up something big.

That something, in fact, is Tesla’s new Gigafactory — an almost mind-blowingly huge manufacturing plant that the company is currently building just outside of Reno, according to The Verge.

By now, it’s no secret that Tesla CEO Elon Musk has big ambitions. And according to the press Tesla recently invited to tour their new factory, the Gigafactory seems to be a physical manifestation of those ambitions — both in scope and actual, literal size.

“We consider [the factory] to be a product. The factory itself is the machine that builds the machine,” Musk said in a press conference. “It actually deserves more attention from creative problem solving engineers than the product that it makes.”

When the factory is completed, the 3,200-acre plant will be the largest building in the world by footprint, The Verge reported.

Of course, it won’t actually be completed for a while. It currently has 1.9 million square feet of floor space, and the factory is only 14 percent completed, according to Jalopnik.

But once built, Tesla wants to use the plant to build enough batteries for 1.5 million Model 3 cars per year — 150 gigawatt hours of batteries, according to The Verge.

Much of the manufacturing process will be automated, with “machines building machines,” as Musk refers to it. But the factory will also employ 6,500 people when it becomes operational, Wired reported.

Tesla currently plans to use the currently completed 14 percent to start production by 2018, Jalopnik reported.

The Gigafactory is being built in collaboration with Panasonic, which is investing huge amounts of money to develop and build production lines within the plant.

The companies broke ground on the project in June of 2014, and the plant is already a mile long, Jalopnik reported.

A factory of this scale is a huge gamble, but Musk seems to be betting his entire company’s future on its success. The Gigafactory is being built just to manufacture batteries for one car: the Model 3. A vehicle that Musk hopes will allow him to make the rest of his dreams a reality.

But, huge gamble or not, we have to give Musk credit for the sheer ambitious scale of the Gigafactory.